Emory
We aren’t special. Humans, I mean. Actually, we are special, but that’s ’cause we know how to use our hands for basically everything and also we can form complex ideas about our environments. But, in a lot of ways, we’re the same as any other animal.
Some people think humans have more complicated feelings than other animals, but I’d say remorse is about the most complicated feeling somebody could have and it’s not a distinctly human thing. To regret.
A few years ago, some scientists did a study on rats and found that when the little guys took the wrong turn in a maze and lost out on a treat, they’d look back over their shoulders, brains sparking with a desire to turn around and reverse it. Scientists were all shocked, but I don’t know why they would be. There wasn’t a single being who made choices who wouldn’t sometimes feel shitty about the ones they made. There weren’t exceptions to regret. It was like breath, food, baby making. You couldn’t be alive without regret.
I wasn’t new to regret when I lost Adela right after I’d first got her. I’d had a life full of it, actually. But it was a different kind of feeling with her. A hot rush of remorse. Looking over my shoulder and wishing I’d never brought her to the Girls at all. Before her, I wasn’t sad I didn’t have a best friend, a person to fold into and feed my secrets. But once I met her, I hadn’t prepared to let her go. Especially not so quickly.
Regret feasted on what was left of me like a falcon going after its prey’s unhatched eggs. Swooped down and snatched the most precious parts of me. I wasn’t throwing a pity party or nothing, but it hurt to feel the gaping absence. Kind of like when I first got the idea in my head that a baby would be all I needed, all we needed, and I changed my life forever. You couldn’t undo something like that.
It’s hard to explain what I felt about Jay ’cause I felt nothing. But also everything. It wasn’t love, not exactly, but it wasn’t lust either. He was just my most urgent pursuit, an electric tide to fill my empty days, and I liked him, at least for a while. That boy wanted me unlike any other. I’d never felt that before, not from anyone, and I realized I liked it. I wanted more.
Suddenly, everywhere I looked, all I saw was the absence of that. My old friends didn’t care about me enough to listen to me talk about the beaks of woodpeckers. None of those other boys besides Jay wanted nothing from me but the feeling of my breathless body beneath theirs. Grammy and Pawpaw kept me fed and loved me to pieces, but I knew they also resented me. I didn’t blame them either. They gave up so much of their lives the day Ma dropped me on their porch back when I was just five. I wondered if they regretted it sometimes, taking me in. Prob’ly.
Then Christa happened. Christa was Grammy’s second cousin’s daughter and she’d just gone on maternity leave, so Grammy was covering for her, taking on her shifts at the dry cleaner’s in the next town over. We didn’t see Christa all that much before I turned seventeen, but when Grammy took over her shifts, Christa started coming over every week or so with her new baby—I think just to check up on Grammy and make sure she still had a job to go back to—but anyways, Christa would give Grammy her daughter to hold and Grammy would coo and sway and look like an eager bunny rabbit staring at that baby. I’d never seen her like that before.
After three weeks of this, I was sitting on the couch with my textbook laid out in front of me and Christa asked if I wanted to hold the baby. I shrugged, even though I wanted to, of course I did, she was real cute and everything, and so Christa passed the baby over, right into my arms.
Her legs curled up on my chest like a roly-poly and she had this thick, soft hair that smelled like fresh laundry and butter, and when I looked at her small face, I understood what Grammy felt. Nothing seemed to matter but this tiny person and you could just stare at her forever and love her even when she shit on you. I stayed like that, holding the baby, until Grammy said it was her turn. She stayed rocking the baby for another hour till finally Christa took the baby and left and there was nothing more devastating than the sagging air in our house after that child was swept out the front door.
So when I stopped taking my pills, I thought I was giving my grammy the gift of a baby that she hadn’t even gotten when I came around, since I was already old enough to go to school. I thought that’s what she wanted, and then our house would always be so full and bursting with hope, like when Christa’s baby came around. I was gonna have someone to love and to be loved by in the way Jay loved me. Completely and without condition. That’s what I thought I was getting when I stopped taking the pills. When I took the pregnancy test. When I decided I was gonna name my daughter Gemma after the treasure spilled at the bottom of our sea.
But that was before I told anybody, before I started to feel suffocated beneath a love I couldn’t return. Before I gave birth and realized I got a lotta love from Kai, with Kai, but I didn’t have no one to cover my shifts at school. I didn’t have extra hands to hold that baby and fill him back up with love and no one seemed to care what I was losing ’cause they all believed I’d done this to myself. And I guess, in simple terms, I had.
I never regretted my child. But if I could’ve turned around and walked back in the direction I came from, I would’ve. Still, here we were. And despite how we’d gotten here, despite the possibility of my first best friend reduced to sawdust and a bloody patch of dune lake dirt, I was determined to be happy.
If I was a lizard and this whole world thought I was prey, then I would be the type of lizard who was smart enough to swallow my eggs and keep ’em tucked into the pouch of my stomach before I ever let somebody come and crush ’em.
I would focus on Kai. That’s what any animal would do, I thought. I knew what I felt wasn’t distinctly human, but some days I thought it’d be better to be some other kind of critter so even if the regret still spiked a hole through me, I prob’ly wouldn’t remember it an hour later. Like those rats in the maze when their little brains blessed them with forgetting.
We sorted through boxes of clothes in Jay’s church’s basement while all the church ladies snickered at me around us. Jayden had Kai wrapped in one of his ma’s shawls on his chest, the way Kai liked best, and after three failed attempts, I’d finally let Jay hold my hand. My mind was always changing about him, me, us, and I was liable to float into a new world of feeling before I even realized my feet were off the ground.
Today I sorta thought I might love him. So I let my palm slip into his as we moved to the next box and Kai mewled. There wasn’t no use fighting my feeling. Like Grammy always said, fighting without no reason’s as useful as a trapdoor in a canoe. Or maybe as useful as a rat regretting not picking up the cheese now in his brother’s stomach. It doesn’t do nobody no good.
“I thought you said they wouldn’t care if I came,” I whispered to Jay.
I’d agreed to go to his church’s clothing drive ’cause Kai was only five weeks and already fit into his three-to-six-months onesies. He was in the ninety-eighth percentile for height and I knew I needed some bigger clothes fast, before my breast milk turned him into a baby gorilla. Jay said the church’s clothing drive was free and everyone would be real friendly and welcoming, not like his parents at all. He said they would care that the baby was here and taken care of and being raised in a Godly fashion. But I was being looked at like a vulture in a crowd of bird-watchers. I didn’t feel welcomed at all.
“They don’t,” Jay whispered back. “They just don’t have a lot of white folks coming in here, that’s all.”
I shrugged. No one I knew had ever been inside the Baptist church. We were Methodists or Catholics, sometimes Evangelical, but none of my family or friends were Baptists or knew Baptists, almost like we weren’t all Christians at all. I didn’t think it was a race thing, though. More like a matter of faith that happened to coincide with sides of the highway and skin color, but not entirely. We had African Americans at our church. Two families, in fact. One came from Oklahoma and the other from Ghana. We welcomed them with open arms. Not like this.
“Maybe we should go,” I said.
“Just wave and say hi and everybody’ll hush and get back to business. They just wanna make sure you’re friendly.”
I looked up at an older couple rolling pairs of socks at the next table and smiled. “How y’all doing?” I said, prepared to prove Jay wrong. But then the lady set down her last roll of socks and wove around the table toward us. She grinned and squeezed Jay’s shoulder.
“We just fine, baby, thank you for askin’. Real nice to meet you, sweetheart.” She wasn’t sarcastic about it at all, and she looked at me like Grammy did when I showed her my report card. Proud. Then she turned to Jay. “Jayden, when you coming back to run youth group? The youngins always looked up to you. We’d love to have you back sometime.” Her gaze fell to Kai. “Maybe one day this little fella can join the group, hmm? I’m sure y’all raisin’ a fine young man.”
“Trying, ma’am. We ’preciate your generosity.” Jayden’s tilted smile could soften a whole room like butter on a warm day. He gestured to the baby clothes in my arm. “They grow fast.”
“Sure do,” the lady said. “You was that small once. Feels like not more than two moons ago. You tell your parents hi from us, now, and we’ll see y’all at Sunday service.” She turned toward me and there was nothing but warmth woven in her face. “You welcome to come too, sweetheart. I know not everyone been thrilled about the…situation, but you always welcome here. I’ll make sure of it.” She squeezed my arm like she’d squeezed Jay’s and walked back to the table where her husband was standing.
Jay was right. The whole room stopped staring, at least not more than anyone else in town, and we were free to sort through boxes under the peaceful watch of the kindest Baptists in all of Florida.
“She was so nice,” I said. I held Jay’s hand tighter, instead of just letting my fingers hang.
“Yeah, she is. Not all them like that, ’specially at service when some of the folks who don’t really got no faith go, but most people are more like Mrs. Carol.” Jayden pulled a fuzzy thing from the nearest box and unraveled it. It was a bear costume, two curved ears sewed to the top. “For Halloween? I’ll be papa bear if you be mama bear.”
I laughed and when I saw Jayden today, I saw a maroon lake glimmer at sunset. A brazen young pine emerging from honeysuckle threatening to choke it. A single pure egg guarded for life.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that.” Brown bears had always been my favorite. Grammy used to tell me the story of Goldilocks at bedtime the night before my birthday and Christmas and Easter, and Grammy would call Goldilocks “Emmylocks” and I would giggle, but really I didn’t wanna be Goldilocks. I wanted to be one of the bears.
Now I knew brown bears were loner animals, didn’t like being around each other much at all, but all the stories about them came in forms of family. Mama, papa, cub. Lonely till they found the ones who made loneliness not worth the familiar gnaw. When I was young, I wanted to be the cub. Now I thought maybe I wanted to be the mama. I wondered if it was possible for that to be us. Me, Jay, Kai. Mama, papa, cub.