My right arm is strong, which shouldn’t surprise me: I spend approximately twenty hours a day holding a fifteen-pound infant.
Gesturing in Gabe’s direction, I tell Trinity to get in the car.
“Who the fuck’re you?” Brian wants to know. His fingertips are pressed into his cheek. I hope it throbs.
“Nina’s stepmom,” I say.
“Who the fuck’s Nina?”
Trinity, dazed but composed, says, “My sister’s friend,” as I answer, “The little girl whose house you vandalized two nights ago.”
Trinity shouts, “What?”
He tells her, “Sweetie, we were wrecked. I mean, just obliterated.”
“Obliterated is what you’re going to be if you go anywhere near these girls again,” I say. “Got it?”
Trinity’s eyes go comically, theatrically wide. “What did you do?” She screams the question. It’s the scream of someone who knows what Brian’s capable of.
Two doors down, my mother emerges from her trailer. “Amanda?” she calls. Her voice crackles with excitement. I should be mortified, but this is exhilarating.
“Get in the car,” I tell Trinity.
“Don’t get in this psycho’s car,” Brian says.
“Get in the car,” I repeat.
“We’ll talk later,” Brian says.
“No, you won’t.”
For whatever reason, Trinity trusts me. She turns her back on her boyfriend and walks calmly across the grass to the Subaru, where Gabe and the baby stand marveling. Astonished, they look identical. When Gabriel Theodore Feldman was born in 1985 in Hartford, Connecticut, his parents—had they been the gambling type—would have bet against their son ever stepping foot in a mobile home park, let alone witnessing any trailer-side altercations, let alone marrying a girl who instigates them. Lucky for me, Hank and Diane only got to guess at, not choose, Gabe’s future. And now he’s looking at me the way he did in Carrie’s truck that hazy September nearly fourteen years ago. The click of the disposable camera was satisfying. Something mechanical, magical, that could also be thrown away. You’re real, he said.
Before me, it was all fake.
Brian’s last retort, delivered with a sneer is, “Who are you—my mom?”
Over my shoulder, I say, “I’m someone’s mom, Brian.”
* * *
In the car, I show Trinity the pictures Gabe snapped of Carrie’s front lawn. Trinity weeps as she flips through the collection. Gabe was fastidious, photographing Brian’s landscaping efforts from every angle. Did he imagine us presenting our evidence in court?
“I don’t even care about politics,” Trinity says. “I was just trying to be a good sister.”
“I’m sure you’re a great sister,” Gabe says, navigating the twists and valleys of the rural road.
I say, “Look, Trinity, it’s not your fault. You can’t choose how Brian spends his leisure time. But maybe consider dumping an asshole who vandalizes the homes of thirteen-year-olds and has legitimately threatened to shoot my mother’s cat.”
Trinity grimaces, clearly no stranger to the cat saga. “Do you think I should break up with him?” she asks Gabe. At some point in the last ten minutes, she has shifted her blind faith from me to him. Probably because I’m coming across as a little unhinged, and Gabe, as a good-looking man of a certain age, is Trinity’s exact type.
“Um, how old is he exactly?” Gabe asks.
Trinity sniffles. “Twenty-four.”
Gabe and I exchange a look. “Dump him,” he says. “Posthaste.”
We drop her off at home, rounding the circular driveway and making our getaway before her parents can rush out and question us—though as Gabe points out, “They seem pretty hands-off.” By the time we get back to Carrie’s house, our baby is sound asleep. His head lolls as Gabe lifts the car seat, but he doesn’t wake up. It’s possible we have overstimulated him.
In the yard, Carrie is sitting on top of the picnic table, her bare feet resting on the bench. Shielding her eyes against the setting sun, she waves at us.
“Go hang out,” Gabe tells me. “I’ll come get you when Jack wakes up.”
“You don’t have to,” I say. “I’ve been pumping. There’s breastmilk in the freezer. You can feed him.”
Gabe hesitates. His resistance is subtle and brief, but I catch it.
You have a baby, I think. So feed him.
“To thaw the milk, I just . . .”
“Run the bag under lukewarm water. Bottles are in the cupboard above the fridge.”
“Right. Okay.” Gabe smiles at me and, having summoned the courage, marches his son into the house. I go to Carrie.
From my back pocket I withdraw the crumpled twenty she gave me last night. I hold it in the air in front of her nose until she, comprehending, takes it between two fingers.
“You still lost, technically,” I tell her. “But only by a couple of hours.”
I’m not prepared for Carrie’s reaction. Her features collapse in a display of unveiled emotion. Tears spring from her eyes. “No shit! Are you serious?”
“I think Gabe might’ve proposed ten years ago, if I’d let him.”
“Of course he would have. You know, people don’t normally love other people as much as Gabe loves you. It’s kind of weird. Congratulations, Amanda.”
I stare at her, willing myself to speak. This is my chance. We are alone. No one is hungry or sobbing or otherwise needing us.
Someday, when my son understands language, I will tell him I’m sorry. Probably I will tell him multiple times a day: Sorry for yelling at you in the grocery store. Sorry for roughly yanking your arm through your coat sleeve. Sorry for plopping you on the floor and immediately distancing myself, as if every second you’re not climbing up my leg is precious. Sorry for screaming into a pillow. Sorry for behaving as if you’re the problem or your dad is the problem or the collection of unpaid parking tickets is the problem when I am and have always been the only problem.
Though I fantasize about communicating with Jack in English, I also doubt our relationship will ever be truly shaped or altered by words. Who has ever said of their own mother, “She screamed into pillows, but she always apologized after”? We remember what our parents did and how they made us feel. Jack won’t consider what unspeakable actions my screaming into a pillow replaced. The sin was needing to scream at all.
When I was thirteen, I went to retrieve my lip gloss from the cup holder in my mother’s truck, and I left an interior light on, draining the battery overnight and preventing Jaclyn from getting to work on time. I was still half-asleep when she pulled me out of bed and slapped me. What shocked me was not her capacity for violence—of which I was already aware: the way she choked the air in front of my brother’s face or hammered her own fist against her thigh, tenderizing the strongest part of her—but that she had hit me over something so trivial. Thirteen was an age at which I often told my mother, You have ruined my life. Not that she was in the process of ruining it, or that she behaved as if she wanted to ruin it, but that she already had. My life, finished. Once she ordered me to wash a saucepan in which I’d allowed the remains of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to cluster and calcify. Already mad at her for some forgotten reason, I filled the pot and tossed its contents, murky with soap and cheese and waterlogged noodles, at Jaclyn’s chest. The bile splashed against her chin and soaked through the cotton of her white sweater.
She didn’t hit me then. Why did she hit me over an honest mistake? When I compared notes with Carrie, she confirmed that Rosalind Hart was similar in her unpredictability. Our mothers’ moods were frighteningly, almost offensively, unlinked to our deeds, good or bad.
Jaclyn never apologized for the morning of the dead car battery. Though I’m sure she felt remorse, apologizing would have been futile. Even now, when she talks to me over the phone, I barely hear her. All that
she says and has never said merges into a fixed and immutable impression of my mom. I love her and I dread her. I forgive her and I never will. How can I expect Jack to feel differently about me?
I’ve always thought of my relationship to Carrie as familial, nearly as intuitive, vital, and maddening as that between me and my mom. As kids, we ended handwritten notes, passed between desks in our sixth-grade classroom, with LYLAS. Our own children, blood-related to each other, have further ensnared us in this idea of ourselves as grown siblings, guaranteed to reappear at holiday parties and funerals, drunkenly impervious to the proof of each other’s adulthood. But what if I chose not to love Carrie like a sister? What if we redefined the terms?
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She looks surprised, and then the opposite. “Are you really?”
“For some things.”
“Which?”
“For showing up at your house without calling first. For not calling at all, ever. For becoming a stranger to Nina. For ditching you with a newborn when you were eighteen.”
Carrie frowns. “You don’t have to call before you come over.”
“I’m not sorry about Gabe.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to be.”
“I mean, it was an objectively terrible thing to do. Skipping town with the father of my best friend’s child.”
“But it was worth it.” A statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
Carrie is silent. I still want what I wanted when we were squeezed into the same hospital bed, watching people on television lose their virginities without consequence. What I did to Carrie was worse than what she did to me. Only in hindsight do her actions seem especially cruel, whereas my betrayal was never more acute than the moment I announced I was following Gabe to New York. Still, I’m mad. Not on behalf of my thirty-one-year-old self, who’s going to be fine. I’m mad on behalf of the girl I was. The girl with whom Gabe would make impish eye contact as his hand remained buried in Carrie’s hair. Who was expected to bear the news of her friend’s pregnancy with stoic resignation then tender resolve.
I liked him first.
Carrie reads my mind, the way she used to. Her hands grip the raw edge of the picnic table. “Gabe and me . . . I mean, insofar as we were ever anything . . .”
My cheeks are hot. I want to know everything and also nothing about the brief period of time in which Gabe and Carrie’s relationship took precedence over what I had with either of them. Given a film reel of those six weeks, I would pause and then return to the footage again and again.
“Sleeping with him . . .” Carrie is speaking circuitously, the topic awaiting clearance to land.
I nod.
She exhales. “I would love to say it had nothing to do with you. That I was seventeen and I went after the new kid because he appealed to me. Which he did. Obviously he did, especially in the moment. But if I’m being honest, I knew it would hurt you. And hurting you both did and did not appeal to me.”
“Why would you want to hurt me?”
The question is a reflex. I once took pleasure in deleting Carrie’s number from my cell (as if I didn’t have it memorized). And I was twenty-three or twenty-four the time I let Paige answer Gabe’s phone, unattended and vibrating on the kitchen counter, caller ID flashing Carrie’s name. I could hear Carrie’s confusion through the speaker, and yet I did nothing to disguise my drunken laughter. Gabe returned from the bathroom and wrenched the phone from Paige’s hand, shooting venomous looks at both of us as Carrie told him Nina was in the ER with a fever of 103.
“I don’t know,” Carrie says. “When we were kids it seemed to me like you always got what you wanted. And I was crazy about you—so when it was me or my attention you wanted, you got it. But then we were older, and the stakes felt higher, and I couldn’t tell where you ended and I began. I know that’s a cliché of codependency, but . . .”
We’re having trouble sustaining eye contact. We ought to have had this conversation in a bar in our twenties, in the neon glow of a beer sign, pint glasses sweating in our hands. But we waited too long. Now we’re old; we’re sober; mosquitos keep landing in the creases of our elbows and on the napes of our necks.
She says, “You were ready to Moon River it all over America. And I just needed something else. At least, I needed to need something else. So maybe sleeping with Gabe was an experiment in you not getting what you wanted. In me taking something from you. For once.”
I slap at another bug. “You were schooling me in loss?”
“Maybe. To see if you could handle losing me. Or me winning. But God, I didn’t know the effects would be so irreversible. Before it happened, I’d have sworn that if I ever got knocked up, I’d be the first girl in line at the Mansfield Planned Parenthood in the morning. And I had no idea the ridiculous tension between you and Gabe was, like, the foundation of a lasting relationship. I mean, it’s a fucking miracle you two are still together. What are the chances?”
In between Nina’s birth and Jack’s, there were entire years in which Gabe seemed as guaranteed as a brother or a comfortable piece of furniture. I forgot he wasn’t my husband. I forgot he was never mine to begin with. On long subway rides or treks to the hardware store, I would fantasize, innocently, about leaving him. Pressing my body against a stranger’s in a bar. Fucking a man who didn’t know my middle name. It was only after Gabe impregnated me that I saw him as a hologram, shifting between the most familiar person in my life and the boy I once desired so fiercely it made me physically ill not to have him. I used to look at him across the booth at Denny’s, knowing his hands were interfacing with Carrie’s beneath the table, and realize we would either end up together or we wouldn’t.
Both outcomes felt equally impossible.
Carrie takes a breath. She says, “When I found out I was pregnant, I loved my daughter. Immediately. I couldn’t change the way it had happened. I couldn’t give Gabe back to you.”
Finally, I sit beside Carrie on the picnic table, my left knee colliding with her right. As children we rarely fought, and when we did—after I borrowed Carrie’s favorite jeans and washed them with an uncapped Sharpie in the pocket, or after Jennifer Rollins passed Carrie a note that read, Plz rate Amanda’s hotness on a scale of 1–10, and Carrie rated me a 6.5, and Jennifer promptly dropped the note on my desk—the experience was traumatic for both of us. We sobbed until our noses ran. We went home and called each other, hung up on each other, got busy signals as we tried to call each other back. And when it was over, when we’d made up and Carrie had slung her skinny arm around my neck, our friendship felt brand new. As fresh as daybreak, and as full of potential.
It’s a feeling I had assumed was lost forever.
“Well,” I say, aiming for relief, for levity, “I took him back.”
She heaves a sigh and plays along. “Typical.”
“And now we’re staying in your guest room.”
“I love having you in my guest room.”
“We had sex on the floor last night.”
Carrie wrinkles her nose. “Rude.”
“On the rug that used to be in your parents’ kitchen.”
“Amanda?”
“Don’t worry. We were tidy.”
“Amanda.”
I catch my breath and say, “Carrie.”
She takes my hand and pulls it into her lap. “When you and Gabe left for New York, and I couldn’t stop crying into a dish towel that smelled like Nina’s spit-up . . .”
“Uh-huh,” I say, as if familiar with the dish towel. And maybe I am.
Carrie is messing with a metal ring on my middle finger. “My mom made me promise I would never apologize to you. She hated your guts. And I kept defending you, saying, ‘No, no, Amanda and I are even now; we broke each other’s hearts.’ Rosalind thought that was bullshit though, because having a crush on someone and having a baby wit
h someone aren’t the same thing. But now you guys have Jack. So, I’m calling it.” Carrie squeezes my hand. She looks at me. “We’re even, and I’m sorry.”
I nod, understanding both the range and the limits of her apology. She’s sorry for hurting me, but she’s not sorry for having Gabe’s baby. That’s the thing about babies: after you have one, all imagined alternatives to the past become tragedies.
“I don’t want Gabe to keep us separate,” I say. “We’d be like one of those families whose pets don’t get along. Like, there’s a cat in the garage and a dog in the kitchen, and if you forget to shut the door between the two, murderous mayhem ensues.”
“I don’t want that either,” Carrie says.
Through the window of the guest room we hear crying. So rarely has Jack woken up without bursting into tears. The problem, it seems, is that he never consented to falling asleep in the first place. He never consented to any of it—the car seat, the insatiable hunger, the separation from his mom. His life is a series of injustices inflicted upon him. I close my eyes, hoping it occurred to Gabe to thaw the milk preemptively. Hoping he doesn’t give up and emerge from the house carrying our son in front of his body as a shield against my own frustration.
I drop my chin, press my cheek into my shoulder, and wait.
Gabe stays inside.
Carrie catches me staring at the tattoos on her left arm, some of which I know she did herself, contorting her body and straining the muscles in her neck to make it possible. The colors are muted, the designs soft but intricate, like illustrations from a picture book.
“Let me tattoo you,” she says.
“What would you give me?” I ask.
“Whatever you want.”
“The state of Ohio with a heart in it.”
“No.”
“The word mom in old-timey cursive, surrounded by those little blue birds who help Cinderella get dressed.”
Carrie rolls her eyes.
“What about that girl everyone always wants?” I ask. “From your portfolio?”
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