Adela
This whole pregnancy wasn’t anything like people described it. All I felt was sore and tired, a kind of fatigue that couldn’t be slept away, a soreness that didn’t end at my boobs or skin but went further, creaked at my joints and rubbed up against my ribs.
By the time I’d gagged up bile, cleaned myself, and gone upstairs to the kitchen, Noni was already up and swaying by the stove, stirring the largest pot I’d ever seen and crooning some song I’d never heard about some man I didn’t know. Whatever was in the pot smelled rank.
She grinned at me when I entered the room. “You alright, baby? I made you some coffee and I know what you thinkin’, but them doctors is lyin’ ’bout ‘you can’t have no coffee or fish or wine.’ All the women in our family done ate just the same when we big and we been fine. But if you worried, I made sure it was the smallest cup we had.”
The cup was filled to the brim with coffee that Noni had already poured ice, cream, and sugar into, so I couldn’t ask if she had any nondairy options, even though I already knew she wouldn’t.
“What is that?” I nodded to the pot on the stove, still simmering. “It smells awful.”
“This right here is a mixture of dog fennel and ginger. Might not smell all that pleasant, but it’s about to get Mr. Levi his regular bowel movements back. I’ve got some more dog fennel leaves here, if you want to rub ’em up on your clothes so none of them bugs will come biting.”
In a mason jar on the counter, leaves showed themselves through the shimmer of glass.
“Are you a witch or something?” I laughed.
Noni turned to me, serious, her cream-colored hair slick with gel. “This land’s got a whole lot you might not know about, but our family’s been pickin’ leaves and grindin’ seeds and findin’ all kinds of ways to soothe a burn and slow a heartbeat for far longer than either of us been alive. Every day, before you wake up, I check on my garden before I start drying leaves and crushing bark, and if you ever get so much as a cold, I’m gonna go on up into my bedroom and find you exactly what you need to feel better. So don’t go disrespectin’ my tea just ’cause it smell a little funky.”
With that, Noni switched off the burner and screwed the top back on the jar. “Now, I already ate, but you help yoself to anything you want. I gotta get goin’ to clean the Mulberrys’ house real soon, so I’m just gon’ leave the tea here to settle for Mr. Levi this afternoon, but don’t worry, you don’t need to watch it.”
“Okay,” I said, and maybe I thought Noni was crazy, but I also just didn’t want her to be mad at me, because she’d shown me kindness even when I had done nothing but mope around her house, and I didn’t want her to think I was ungrateful. I tried to stay away from the tea, though, grazing the blue tile counters with my fingers, making my way to the fridge.
I grabbed a tomato with a lump on top that looked like a hat and three eggs and opened every cabinet in Noni’s kitchen until I found two bowls.
“You want me to leave out some yarn for you?” Noni asked. “Knitting passes the time.”
I shook my head, my back turned to her as I set the bowls down.
“I was thinking I would head up to the pool today. It’s been forever since I got to swim in a real pool, and I looked it up and did you know there’s a pool not even half a mile from here?”
Noni cackled, smacking her thigh as I broke an egg open on the edge of the counter and poured the inside right into the palm of my hand held over one of the bowls, opening my fingers so the egg whites could drip through into the bowl, desperately trying to pull the yolk with them, but I held it back. Careful not to break it, to handle it with care as I placed it into the empty bowl.
“Why are you laughing?” I kept my eyes focused on the bowls, repeating my process with the other two eggs until I had a bowl with thick translucent yellow that looked just like vegetable oil and another with three rounded yolks that had somehow made their way toward each other, three round globs pressed close and glistening, like they needed some companionship outside their shells. Like it was too much to bear alone.
“No reason, no reason,” Noni said, but I could hear the amused grin in her voice. “I think that’s a great idea, baby. You need directions?”
I got out a plate and cut up the tomato, then made my way over to stand by Noni at the stove, heating a pan and trying to breathe through my mouth and not my nose to escape the smell of dog fennel.
“I looked it up, but I don’t get reception in, like, half of this town, so it’d be nice if you could tell me where to go, just in case.”
I poured the egg whites into the pan, laying tomatoes and a slice of American cheese I’d found in the fridge door on top.
“The pool’s up in the community center, which mean you just gon’ walk on down the road and turn right at the schoolhouse and when you see Ronald’s Bait, you’ll know you just a hop, skip, and a jump from the pool.”
I squinted at her. “But I don’t know what the schoolhouse or the community center looks like.”
Noni dropped five whole allspice berries into her pot and tsked. “You don’t got no sense of direction, do you? This town barely bigger than your thumb.”
I sighed, deciding I’d rather get lost than talk in circles with Noni, and scooped my omelet onto my plate. I ate it standing up in the kitchen, sipping on my sweet iced coffee and looking out the window at the Florida sky, its clouds dense but fluffy, like whipped egg whites in a stretch of pale blue. I despised that sky, its cutting rays, how they made it through layers of my skin.
It was a lonely world, Florida, and I was on the outskirts of it, catapulted onto a shore that radiated disdain, full of people who were supposed to be family but felt more like relics of a life my dad had died in and then sent me to as a punishment, to live among his ghosts.
Even by the beach in a paradise that had never met ice, the sun was taunting me. I was supposed to be golden, that’s what my mom called me, her golden girl, but now I was as dark as all the other people here and I knew it was judgmental and mean, but I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to go home. And this omelet was just more proof I was as far from home as I could get.
Noni left the kitchen and came back a few minutes later in an apron, with a bucket of cleaning supplies in her hand and a wig fastened to her head.
She kissed my cheek. Every time she touched me I felt a flurry of warmth and I wanted her to hug me, hold me, but it felt like defeat, to lean into her, so instead I leaned away. She squeezed me quickly anyway. “Alright, chile, I’m headin’ out. You have a good swim.” She laughed low and shook her head. “Don’t wear that high-neck thing you got on at those competitions, you hear? Gonna give you tan lines.”
I nodded even though I knew that was all I’d brought and all I’d consider wearing, listening to Noni’s feet pound down the hallway and the red front door shut behind her. Alone again, I put the plate in the sink with the empty egg white bowl and then stared into the bowl with the yolks. I didn’t know what to do with them, to throw them out or put them in the fridge, or leave them in that bowl, but it felt wrong to watch them break one after the other, alone at the bottom of the basin, so instead I took my fork and punctured each one, stirred until I could no longer tell the difference between them, and then poured the liquid down the drain of the kitchen sink. They went down together, as one mucus-orange reminder of a thing never come to fruition.
Satisfied, I left the kitchen and removed piles of magazines from the plastic-covered couch so I could lay down and, somewhere along the way, I fell asleep.
Hands cupped, head tucked down, pushing the water away from the body, neck reaching up, gulping, back down. Dodging the ten-year-old boy with his eyes squeezed shut playing Marco Polo. Resisting the water, hands to sides, next stroke. As I emerged for my next breath, one of two tween girls having a water fight scraped her hand across the surface of the pool, pushing water up in a splash with her, right over her friend and into my open mouth.
I swallowed chlorine as I went back under, lungs hot and struggling for breath, coming back up to tread and say, “Be careful, God,” to the girl in between coughs. I freestyled to the edge of the pool and pulled myself out, removing my goggles and swim cap and placing them on top of my towel. Like always, the water had still found its way to my hair, where it would dry and mat the lower layer for me to delicately pull apart later.
I sat down in the cleanest corner of dry cement I could find. I’d found the community center pretty easily, since there didn’t seem to be more than a few functional buildings in Padua Beach and both the high school and the community center, low brick buildings with green metal roofs, had signs it looked like the town had put all its money into making only to have letters fallen off and painted over.
The moment I arrived at the pool, I understood why Noni had laughed at the thought of me in it, me thrilled to slip into the silky water and glide. This pool wasn’t anything like the pools I swam in at home. It was probably less than half of an Olympic-length pool and there weren’t even any swim lanes, so I was forced to weave through a maze of children just to make it from one length of the tiny thing to another.
All I wanted was to sink into the complete stillness the water brought me, no thoughts that weren’t about the stroke and the gurgle of sound somewhere far off. But in Padua’s pool, I was distracted by the thumping current of a pool crowded with children kicking in whatever direction would keep them afloat, and none of the sounds resonated through the water like a lullaby. Instead, they screeched and pounded at my ears. So I got out. At least there was an umbrella by me now, though, so I was shaded from the harshest reach of the sun.
As I was drying off, watching all the kids and their parents in the pool, a scattering of Black and white patches, rarely blurring, I saw the lifeguard, the whistle around his neck twisted between his fingers.
I had a bad habit of falling in love with lifeguards who wanted nothing to do with me. It was part of swimming, all of us gathered together on the sidelines of the pool giggling about whatever older boy sat high above us, peering down at us like a beacon of all we couldn’t have. Dry, gorgeous, and so out of reach.
After I admitted my feelings to the college lifeguard at last year’s summer intensive and he turned so red I thought I might have to call an ambulance, I vowed never to look at a lifeguard again. But the second my eyes grazed over the lifeguard at Padua Beach’s community pool, they paused. Because I knew that face. One of the only faces in this town I knew. He didn’t seem to see me, so I stood up and slipped on my flip-flops so I didn’t risk a fungal infection, making my way around the pool to where he sat in a chair beneath another umbrella. The lifeguard stand was directly in view of the sun, high enough up to touch it, obscured only by the feverish red of that umbrella.
He saw me coming and he perked at the sight of my face, or my body, or both, looking me up and down in my sport swimsuit, me and my dripping hair. I didn’t expect him to even look at me, but now he was grinning, and the pool might have one good thing going for it, in the gleam of sweat on his forehead.
“Chris, right?” My feet squeaked in my flip-flops as I shifted my weight into my hip. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
Chris stood, placing his lifeguard buoy on the folding chair and edging toward me. “Yeah, I work here on the weekends.”
“You swim?”
“Course I swim. I saw you in the water too, but I didn’t know it was you with them goggles and cap on.”
He laughed and for the first time since I was ten, I was embarrassed to have been seen swimming, in my cap. But Chris must have understood, because he loved the water too. Look at him, shirt still wet in patches like he’d come straight out of the ocean and hurriedly thrown it on, his sweat dewy and turning a light green shirt the same shade as all these pines. He might have been the only person in this whole state who could understand me.
I bit my lip. “Well, you’re at work, so I don’t want to distract you.”
“No, wait, I wanna talk to you. C’mon, sit next to me.” He flashed his teeth at me and that’s when I saw his shark tooth, set on the top row in front of another grown tooth, a dagger that somehow made his smile more endearing, and I wanted to sit next to him.
Chris bypassed his folding chair and sat on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling into the water and I followed, slipping off my flip-flops and sitting beside him with my feet in the water too, even as the children splashed up into my face, even as I worried some kind of rare bacteria would crawl across the concrete and infect me.
I stared out at the pool, nervous to even look at him, but when I glanced over I saw he was looking at me the same way he did in that McDonald’s, his eyes squinted just enough I felt safe in their sliver of brown, a smile so slight and present it made it look like his whole face was one soft, constant beam of light and it was all for me. He wasn’t thinking about anything but me.
This was the first of my mistakes. To believe that his eyes were the most honest thing about him when really, it was his hands. The way they crept toward the tenderest parts of me when I was so focused on his gaze I didn’t pay attention the way I should have. Maybe if I had known the Girls back then, it would have been different. But I didn’t know them as anything more than a mirage and Chris was right in front of me, staring right at me.
I returned my attention to the pool, where a father held a six-month-old in a floral sun hat up into the air, where she shrieked and then, when I thought he was going to maybe hug her or let her feet touch the water, he instead blew into her face and dropped her. Just like that.
“No!” I cried out. No one but Chris could hear over the muddled screams of the children and the churning water, and he whipped his head toward the pool.
“What? Something wrong?” Chris placed a hand on my thigh, as if to protect me.
I pointed to the corner of the pool where the baby had gone under and that’s when I saw her small cupped hands, rising to the surface, her on her back, sucking in air again. The dad scooped her up and kissed each cheek and, once again, she shrieked in delight, small crescent dimples appearing in her face.
“He just—that man just dropped his baby into the water,” I stammered, now returning to an awareness of Chris’s palm against my thigh.
Chris laughed. “That’s how you teach a kid to swim, girl. No way to learn if they don’t try. Besides, babies born knowin’ how to swim. They swimmin’ in they mama’s bellies for longer than they been out in the air, in that amniotic sac and shit.”
I laughed. “How do you know that? I’ve never met a guy who can say amniotic sac, let alone knows anything about them.”
Chris shrugged. “I’m real good with kids.” He added, “And I value the female body, Adele.”
“It’s Adela. Uh-del-uh.”
“For sure.” He squeezed my thigh just a little. “Listen, I don’t wanna make you uncomfortable or nothing, but the moment I saw you, I knew you was something special, and I feel like you showin’ up here’s just fate, know what I’m sayin’? So I was thinkin’ maybe you’d wanna come out with me later? I can show you ’round Padua.”
I looked up at him and he was still staring at me with that same unrelenting focus. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right. Was he asking me out? It was impossible the most handsome guy I’d ever seen, at least the most handsome Black one, who was also a lifeguard and talked to me in the delicate language of wind chimes, his voice subtle and calm and sure, could like me back. I wanted to reach out and touch his mostly shaven beard, was sure it would feel like a flower petal rubbed between two fingers.
Chris was nothing like any boy I’d ever thought I loved. He was nothing like David, the boy responsible for what was happening inside me. David’s beard had been new and rough, so rough that the next morning I woke up with an irritated red chin from where his beard had scratched up against me in those sloppy kisses.
Chris wasn’t anything like that. He thought I was special from the first moment he saw me in that McDonald’s, when Noni kissed my head and rushed off to her next job and I sat there, finishing my salad, and the next thing I knew, this Black guy in acid-wash jeans was sliding into the booth across from me. I thought he might try to mug me, but then he smiled.
“I don’t wanna disturb you or nothin’, but I just saw you was sittin’ here alone and I don’t think no woman should never have to sit alone,” he said, and I watched his eyes dart around the room and then land on me, his knee bouncing up and down and causing his single hoop earring to tremble. He was concerned for me, for my safety, nervous but prepared to dart up and make sure nobody hurt a lone girl in a McDonald’s.
He reached out his hand to shake. “I’m Chris.” It was such a normal name. I’d expected it to be something scary like Bull or maybe Tyrone.
“Adela,” I said, placing my hand in his. Instead of shaking it, he pulled my hand toward him and leaned down so his lips were kissing the top of my hand, and when he let go the entire surface of my hand was covered in saliva. No one had ever done something so charming and kind, kissing my hand and making sure I wasn’t sitting alone.
“Can I ask you something, Adela?”
I nodded.
“You like fish? To eat?”
I thought he was going to ask me where I was from or if I had a boyfriend, but maybe this was a southern-boy way to ask someone out.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
“What kind of fish you like?”
“I don’t know, cod?” All I knew was cod had less calories than salmon.
It’s not so much I wanted him to cook me a fish as I wanted someone to care enough to buy one from a market and season it just for me.
“Cod, aight. So if I went out fishing and I caught a nice big catfish, like two feet big, and you was hungry so I brought it to you, put some cajun spices up on it, grilled it, put it in front of you, you gonna say, ‘Nah, I like cod. I won’t eat no catfish’?”
Chris tapped the table with his fingernail. “Here’s my real question for you. If I put a catfish in front of you after spending my time catching it, what you gon’ do? Eat the catfish or tell me to go back out there and catch you a cod even though there’s not no cod in the water?”
He wasn’t asking me out, he was asking me about fish. But at least he was asking me something at all, so I thought about it, trying to take my time, since I could tell it really mattered to him that I give him an honest answer, one I’d fully thought out. After a minute, I said, “I’d eat the catfish. It’s not like you can catch a fish that’s not in the water.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And that’s why you a good girl, Miss Adela. I can already tell.”
Now I considered Chris’s proposition, going out with him later, and I was about to tell him that no, my noni wouldn’t like that and I wasn’t sure I should be dating anyone anyway in my condition, but then I smelled the tuna.
The father with the baby girl in the floral hat and two other kids sat on towels a few yards away and the father had taken out plastic-wrapped tuna sandwiches and opened them for the older children. The smell of that tuna drifted all the way through the thick smell of chlorine and sunscreen until it was all I could think about. The wave of nausea came fast and all I could do was keel over and allow the mouthwatering cramping to rise up and out of my mouth, tomato-colored vomit spilling right into the pool.
The moment the nausea passed, I realized what I’d done, and the humiliation washed over me. All the children in the pool were screaming and rushing to get out; Chris had quickly removed his feet from the pool and gone to grab the megaphone, shouting through it, “Pool’s closing, pool’s closing, all y’all make your way to the exit.”
I was stunned that I had done it, so stunned I squeezed my eyes shut and didn’t remove my feet from the pool, staying as still as I could, as though that would reverse what I’d done. After all the other people had left the pool, Chris crouched down next to me, wrapped a towel around my shoulders, and said, “C’mon, Adela,” and when I still didn’t move, he picked me up and took me to where he had laid his long red buoy away from the pool and sat me on top of it, like a bench. “Just wait here,” he said.
I opened my eyes and watched as he began the process of straining the water, the net reemerging filled with chunks of vomit, dirt, and leaves long dead and fallen, and Chris placed all the dirt and vomit into a plastic bag. Then he continued this process, his biceps pulsing, until I could no longer see anything but rust and too-fine sand at the bottom of the pool.
He disappeared into the community center for a few minutes and, when he reappeared outside, he was smiling again. He fiddled with the skimmer and added chlorine tablets, something I’d seen a million times but never because of me, and I ducked my head and looked at my ashen shins. In a moment, he was beside me, sitting on the buoy.
“Look at me,” Chris said.
I looked up. He was still staring at me the same way, even after I threw up red in his blue pool. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened.”
He ignored my apology and his voice turned suave. “Can I at least take you out? How ’bout Monday?”
I shook my head, couldn’t believe he’d still want to do anything with me. “I have school Monday. Don’t you?”
Chris laughed. “Nah, I’m not in school no more.”
I wasn’t sure I could be around somebody who dropped out of high school. “You graduated, though?”
“For sure. My grandmama made sure of it.”
I was relieved. He was just a little older than me, maybe he even had plans to go to college. I always thought a college guy would be better for me, more evolved, more ready for me, and here he was.
I felt a steady buzz rise in me, like when I was ten laps in and began to think of when I would be done, when I would hit the end of the pool and push off for the very last time, and I wanted to prove myself. I wanted to be the best. It wasn’t often a boy liked me, and now this guy wanted to see me, wanted to show me his town and cook me catfish after a long day. Not every girl could say that and for a moment all my worries became masked with the jitters of a simmering desire and the hope that I could have what every girl wanted: someone to love her, protect her, clean her vomit out of the pool and not make her feel bad about it for even a moment.
Chris smiled and his shark tooth glistened in the sun and I remembered myself. I was pregnant. Crushes and dates and the allure of want were for girls who hadn’t already wasted their desire on boys who trampled over them and disappeared, leaving us with nothing but school transfers and staggering nausea. Chris wouldn’t want me. He couldn’t. And it was better to not even try.
“Sorry,” I said, standing up, smoothing down the frizz my hair had dried into. “I have to go home.” And before he could say anything, I left him, sitting by the pool that had once held my insides and now held nothing but chemical water, transformed to a miraculous ice blue.