Everything Here is Under Control

by Emily Adrian

  Jack wakes with a long, miserable wail. Eyes squeezed shut, he roots against the fabric of my T-shirt.

  “Shit,” I say, looking over my shoulder as if the car might materialize in the long grass. “He’s hungry.”

  Carrie turns in a slow circle. “We can start walking back. Or if you want, there’s some shade up ahead where you could sit and nurse him.”

  Neither option appeals to me, but Jack is launching into a decibel level that makes my palms sweat and my breasts harden with milk. “Shade,” I say, trotting in the direction of the trees. “Now.”

  Carrie follows with a tight-lipped tolerance. As we enter the grove, the temperature drops and mosquitos whine in my ears. I loosen and unfasten the carrier, shoving the baby into Carrie’s arms so I can sit on a rotting tree stump and deal with my bra. The shirt I’m wearing won’t stay rolled up or tucked into my armpit. Driven insane by the sound of Jack’s cries, I pull the shirt over my head and toss it aside. When he latches on, it’s with comical urgency, but I can’t laugh.

  I’m half naked in the woods

  “You really should get a breast pump,” Carrie says, arms crossed over her spandex top. “We could have brought a bottle.”

  “I ordered one, but it has a million little parts and a novella of an instruction manual. I’m never going to have time to sit down and figure it out.”

  The purchase required making a new Amazon account so Gabe couldn’t see where I’d had the package shipped.

  Looming over me, Carrie claps a mosquito between her hands before it lands on my hairline. “I can hold your baby while you learn how to use a breast pump.”

  “You already have to hold him while I pee and while I wash my hair and while I tie my shoes.”

  Another mosquito hovers too close to Jack, and Carrie murders it. The sound shocks the baby and he ejects a mouthful of milk onto my thigh. “I can also hold him while you use a breast pump.”

  Her self-possession, her nonstop helpfulness, is grating on me. What’s it going to take for Carrie to lose her cool?

  “You could have warned me, you know,” I say.

  “About breast pumps?”

  “About all of it.”

  Carrie looks bored. She excels at looking bored. “I would have, but you didn’t ask.”

  I close my eyes and clench my jaw. Jack is sucking so hard, the pain makes me want to abandon him on this tree stump. Observing my discomfort, Carrie says, “Look, I know this seems like a lot right now. But I swear it’s not as bad as you think. Mostly, you need some sleep.”

  Drenched in sweat and milk and my infant’s spit: “I need so much more than that.”

  We are silent, actively not saying his name.

  “Do you remember when we babysat Nina? That night you went out with Roy?” I ask.

  “God, I forgot about Roy.”

  “And she tricked us into renting Happy Feet?”

  “I remember.”

  “After that night, we went back to New York and I decided to see how long it would take for you to talk to me if I didn’t talk to you first.”

  Carrie’s eyes narrow.

  “Six months went by. And then you emailed me a picture of Nina sitting on a pony.”

  “What? When was this?”

  “She was four.”

  Carrie appears to be racking her brain, straining to remember the parking lot carnival or county fair that produced the pony.

  “I wrote back, ‘Cute!’ and got another six months of silence. By that point, it had been a full year since you had voluntarily spoken to me, and I just . . . gave up.”

  Gave up is inaccurate. It doesn’t imply thinking about her daily, googling her name on my lunch breaks, or taking a perverse satisfaction in the months slipping away, as if I were stronger for every season in which I did not hear Carrie Hart’s voice.

  Carrie is giving me the same look she used to shoot across classrooms, at scatterbrained teachers or illiterate children forced to read aloud. “Amanda, I had a kid.”

  I stare back at her.

  “Have you ever spent time with a four-year-old? Parenting a four-year-old is like trying to keep a perpetually drunk person from getting killed. She was always running into traffic or trying to do a somersault in a shopping cart. If I forgot to text you for a while, it wasn’t intentional.”

  “You’re saying you accidentally didn’t speak to me for a year?”

  “You didn’t speak to me either. On purpose, apparently.”

  It’s aggression dressed up like kindness, this idea that Carrie never stopped wanting to be my friend. To hurt me, all she has to do is pretend she would never bother. She has always known this.

  Jack spits out my nipple and rests his cheek on my breast. Having finished his lunch in the muggy, bug-infested woods, he would now like to nap in the muggy, bug-infested woods.

  I would like to put a shirt on. I would like to drive back to New York.

  Reading my mind, Carrie stoops to retrieve my T-shirt. She shakes off the dirt before handing it to me. When I reach for the carrier, she says, “Let me wear him.”

  I shrug, and she slides her arms through the straps, adjusting their length and fastening all the right buckles from muscle-based memory. Carrie should have had ten babies.

  We walk fast. I feel buoyant, like a dog let off its leash. Like I could go bounding down the path mowed through the wheat if I wanted to. The sky out here is so big and blue and earnest. Maybe Gabe and I should try moving to Ohio. They would hire him at my old high school in a heartbeat. We could buy a house. At Christmastime, we could decorate the house with unironic lights. In the summer, Jack could swing in a tire suspended from a tree.

  Why has it never occurred to me, moving back home? In this moment, I can’t think of a problem it wouldn’t solve.

  I consider texting a picture to Gabe and asking if he remembers this place, but there’s no way he would believe my hike was self-motivated or solitary. He knows me. It’s tempting to imagine that by the time he flies into Cleveland—less than a week—I’ll be a new version of myself. Maternal and disciplined and kind. Because the problem isn’t that having Jack changed me; the problem is that it didn’t. Not even a little bit.

  As the dirt trail merges with the gravel parking lot, Carrie says, “Tyler wants to move back to Columbus, once his dad is doing better. I’m thinking about going with him.”

  No matter how hard I try, I cannot picture Tyler Cox as anything other than an untamed child.

  “How would Nina feel about that?” I ask.

  “I think she’d be thrilled.”

  While we’re on the subject of Nina—while we’re on the subject of skipping town—I should tell Carrie about the funeral procession for Jared Jenkins. How Nina tricked me into front row seats, Her plans for the incriminating photos on her phone. But something holds me back. It’s impossible to say how many secrets Carrie’s daughter is allowed, how many decisions are hers to make. Sometimes Nina seems wiser than the adults tasked with raising her; at other times, like a child still liable to sprint headlong into traffic.

  When it comes to deciphering Nina, I do have one advantage over Carrie: I still remember what it was like to be a nearly teenage girl; parenting one has not warped my perspective. So I know that if Nina has an exit fantasy, the theme is agency. The theme is independence. Moving to Columbus so your mother can hook up with an adult man named Tyler is about the worst thing that can happen to anyone.

  If Carrie and Nina leave Deerling, seeing them will require admitting I want to. Driving eight hours in the ostensible direction of my mom’s trailer and veering toward Carrie’s house at the last second won’t be an option. I’ll have to pick a date. Warn her.

  Being a coward, I will probably opt to stay home.

  It’s obvious our friendship will never be what it was. But after the last ten days, the
idea of losing her again leaves panic ringing in my ears. Without Carrie, I can be an adult, a partner, a half-decent friend to other women. Maybe even an artist someday. But I can’t be a mother.

  I try to tell myself that Carrie’s potential move to Columbus has nothing to do with me, that it’s about her and Tyler and the improbable connection they’ve formed, left to their own devices out here. But I don’t believe it.

  How many times did one of us try to replace the other with a boy?

  With Gabe, it almost worked.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I don’t know exactly what time it is. I don’t look at the clock, because I no longer subscribe to the notion of time. Somewhere in the wild there must exist a creature—not a human woman, but some other kind—whose body only sleeps when it’s convenient, whose body trusts sleep to come when it comes, in doses brief or lengthy. Something with a lot of predators or a precarious treetop living situation. I’ll be her.

  I’m her already.

  It’s not even that Jack is crying; he’s simply awake. His eyes are wide and haunted. He’s waving his fists, squealing like a cheerful rodent. I tell him, I love you. I tell him, don’t grow up and become an asshole. Forty-three minutes pass, or would pass, if I believed in them. Without looking in a mirror or changing the disposable nursing pads wedged inside my bra, I load Jack into the car.

  The Fitbit I gave her for Christmas, my mother warmed to it eventually. Not for counting the steps she’s taken or stairs she’s climbed, but for tracking her sleep. My mother loves to boast about how little rest she requires. Four or five supine hours, and she’s ready to face another day.

  Tonight I’ll call her bluff.

  Jack cries in the car. The radio plays Journey and Sting and Bon Jovi followed by Journey again. The gravel crackles beneath my tires, and my mother’s light is on.

  Inside, I give her a second to extinguish her cigarette before I hand her the baby. Momentarily I worry her clothes have absorbed the smoke and Jack will press his little nose into her pajama top and inhale. I can imagine the punctuation, the frantic typos with which the concern would be posed to BabyCenter.com.

  I let it go, opting to collapse facedown onto my mother’s couch.

  She tosses me a blanket and tries to sing “Hey Diddle Diddle” to the baby, but she’s forgotten what happens after the cow jumps over the moon. She transitions seamlessly into “Edge of Seventeen.”

  I laugh, already half-asleep.

  “You shouldn’t have driven,” she scolds me.

  “To Ohio?”

  “To my house.”

  In my current state—sober, but nonetheless wasted—driving was dumb. I agree. But every once in a while the ever-whooshing windstorm of fear subsides, and I know—I’m certain—I would never hurt Jack. Not by blowing through a stop sign at sixty miles per hour or splashing hot coffee on his velvet cheeks. Tonight I swear I could pilot a plane he was in and keep us aloft.

  “Mom,” I say.

  “Mm-hmm?” She sounds deliriously happy, breathing in the smell of him.

  “Did you ever read my diary?”

  She scoffs into the baby’s scalp. “Her diary,” Jaclyn murmurs. “Are you hearing this?”

  “What about my desk? Did you read the stuff I scribbled all over it?”

  “Yes, Amanda, I read what you wrote on the furniture. Most of it was not very good. I liked your drawings more.”

  “Did you ever worry about me?”

  “All the time.”

  “I don’t remember you demanding to know where I was or what I was doing. I never even had a curfew.”

  “Now you’re mad at me for not giving you a curfew?’

  “Not mad. But I don’t get it. You let me make all the rules.”

  “No. Children don’t make the rules. But they remake the world until the old rules don’t apply. I bet you told yourself your baby would sleep through the night, didn’t you? That all the moms struggling not to nod off in their rocking chairs were spoiling their kids? That you’d put him in his crib at 7:00 p.m. sharp, shut the door, and not open it again until seven in the morning?”

  “Mom, that’s absurd. I never thought that. Jack doesn’t even have his own room.”

  “Still. You thought the baby would be a participant in your life. That his needs would adapt to yours.”

  The couch cushions smell like smoke and Febreze and a springer spaniel we had twenty years ago. My mother’s greatest skill is making things last forever. “Maybe.”

  “By the time you and your brother were teenagers, we all needed some space. I figured it was your God-given right to take some risks. Just watch, Amanda. Try to keep that boy on a leash, and you’ll both lose your minds.”

  “So, when I was in high school, you just lived in a constant state of panic?”

  “I wouldn’t say constant.”

  “Did you trust me?”

  She scoffs again. “Not for a second.”

  The floor creaks as she sways back and forth. My son sighs. In the marshland across the road from Green Acres, bullfrogs bellow like foghorns. At some point, a cat hops onto the couch and settles against the small of my back. It’s unexpected; we’ve never had a cat. Then I remember she does. It’s the summer of 2016—my mother is thin, has a cat named Van Morrison, and may or may not vote for Donald Trump.

  If I were to lose everything—my apartment, my friends, my health insurance, the Netflix subscription, the car, the bar on Wyckoff Avenue, the love of my life—the universe would deposit me here. With hair unwashed and limbs akimbo and my baby clinging to me. (Even in my most negative fantasies, the baby stays with me.)

  I’m almost asleep when she says, “I trusted Carrie more than you. I always thought she had a good head on her shoulders.”

  If I weren’t so tired, I would laugh.

  * * *

  I nurse Jack twice before daybreak. Otherwise, my mother holds him, and I sleep. Around seven thirty she kicks us out so she can get ready for work, and I drive back to Carrie’s house, singing along to the same embarrassing songs that, in the dead of night, made me want to renounce the Midwest.

  After parking the Subaru at a jaunty angle in the driveway, I practically float into Carrie’s kitchen, my nose buried in the swirl of hair at the back of my baby’s head. When you have a newborn, your body is like one of those derelict houses on the side of the interstate, tenants long evicted, roof partially caved in, more leaks and loose screws than you can count. You feel tired in places that aren’t supposed to feel: your hip bones, your kneecaps. But four hours of uninterrupted sleep gets you high. Four hours of sleep makes you think about the future, some distant day when, maybe, you’ll remember who you are.

  Carrie is already up. I expected her to sleep in. Yesterday was the last day of seventh grade, and Nina spent the night at Maxine’s house. Today is the start of the first real vacation Carrie’s allowed herself since opening shop, and the studio will be closed for two weeks. Although she’s booked solid through the rest of the summer, Carrie is still anxious—superstitious, maybe—that the vacation will mark the end of her professional life.

  “Did Jaclyn feed you?” Carrie asks. She’s perched on a barstool, her knees pulled to her chest. A cup of coffee rests on a Deerling Middle School newsletter. It figures Deerling would be the last district to go digital.

  “No,” I say.

  “Can I make you something? Eggs, maybe? Pancakes? You need to eat.”

  Her attention is enough to feed some hollow part of me. I soak it up.

  “Eggs and pancakes,” Carrie proposes, clapping her hands together.

  There will be a mess. Hardened batter adhering to the countertop and a baby crying before we can finish our food. I imagine wet eggs clumping in the sink, blocking the drain. Preemptive guilt compels me to shake my head. “I’ll have some cereal,” I say, regret tightening arou
nd my throat as I pass Jack to Carrie.

  He smiles at her, and I can’t ignore the look of love that washes over Carrie’s face.

  * * *

  Around noon, I go with Carrie to pick Nina up from her sleepover. Mostly I go because I want to get a look at this mansion. I want Maxine’s parents to invite us inside and insist on giving us the grand tour. Ohio opulence is, to me, a novelty. When we were kids, no one around here had an attached garage, let alone an in-ground pool.

  Maxine lives on the same edge of town as my mom, where the roads have no speed limit and cows sometimes stand too close to the shoulder. The farms we pass are Amish; you can tell by the rows of outhouses and the wooden signs advertising jams & pies & rocking chairs in eerie, childlike script. I was a teenager before I realized our Walmart’s designated parking area for horse-drawn buggies wasn’t standard.

  A grassy slope shields the mansion from the road. As we approach the driveway guarded by an elaborate wrought-iron gate, a hidden camera or sensor detects our presence. Some person inside approves our entry. Slowly, the gate swings open.

  Over the hill, the house appears. It’s a disorienting mix of penitentiary stone, New England shutters, and California excess. Palm trees peer over the roof, erect and robust and completely impossible.

  “They’re fake,” I tell Carrie.

  All she says is, “Money is money.”

  The driveway culminates in a roundabout. We park, arbitrarily, halfway around.

  Through the panes of glass flanking the front door, we can see a man at least fifteen years our senior hurrying to greet us. White tennis shorts expose his long, sinewy legs. He has a T-shirt wrapped around his head and a sun visor jammed over the T-shirt. When he throws open the door, we’re besieged by the smell of Banana Boat and sweat. In studious silence the man regards the tattoos netting Carrie’s arms, the wide-eyed infant in mine.

  “I didn’t realize . . .” he begins, but our blank faces dissuade him. “. . . that Nina had a sibling.”

  “He’s mine,” I say, as if there were any doubt.