Simone
The first three months of Luck and Lion’s lives, I was alone. Me, the babies, sometimes Tooth, and that truck that cocooned us. Motherhood makes you lonely, but more than that, having everyone turn away from you in the moment you need them most is a betrayal that lingers like a chipped tooth, for you to drag your tongue over and remember all that was lost and wouldn’t return.
I didn’t think none of my family would ever know my babies, call their names, understand the downy fuzz of their cheeks or the way it shed as they grew. I didn’t think none of my family would ever want nothing to do with me again, after I left. After they made me leave. Jayden not choosing me hurt most, though.
If you’re not your mother’s only child, you know there’s not nobody in the world that can understand the dirt you fought to grow from like your brother. Jayden had been there, in the same bed, in the same trailer, shared the same breath and buckled under the same righteous thunder that my parents wielded best. He understood what it meant to love and hate them, to be their child, and still he chose to stand by them instead of me.
I spent most of my life scooping the blame from Jayden’s shoulders and letting it curve my back into a hook. When he broke Momma’s favorite mug throwing a ball across the trailer with our sisters, I picked up the ceramic pieces, glued them together, and told Momma I was sorry I’d ruined the thing she loved the most.
When some older guys ripped the skin from Jayden’s chest so he was deep brown with a map of raw pink lines, I dressed his wounds and told Pops I’d seen a raccoon attack Jay after he tried to chase it from the Cruzes’ grill.
When Jayden started sneaking out to see the Jeffreys girl across Beach Row and he got caught and pulled back to bed by his T-shirt, I told Momma and Pops that the girl was a sweetheart and they mostly shared their favorite Bible verses and admired the stars spotting the sky together, even though she was known to be a pick-me and she prob’ly couldn’t tell you the difference between Isaac and Isaiah if her momma’s best wig depended on it.
Me and Jayden was close when we were little, and then we frayed. We didn’t have much in common, but that’s not what family’s about. I was the blistering bark that enclosed Jayden’s tender red center and he’d been the soft middle of my world, the only person I knew wasn’t never gonna hurt me. He was gentle, would sob before he screamed, cower before he clawed, and in a family where we stampeded, trampled, or fled at the first sign of smoke swirling the air, he was my safe haven.
But when I left, he didn’t follow me out the door. And maybe I shouldn’t’ve expected him to, he was only thirteen and he always did choose the path of least resistance. Still, I felt myself splinter when my birthday passed and he didn’t call. Shed bark when I ran into him at the Tom Thumb in the gum aisle and he didn’t even smile. Crumbled when my twins was born and he wasn’t there to see it.
Those first three months as a mother were a lesson in how to lose my own core and I was prepared for the rest of my life to be hollow too, for the only family I knew to be the ones who came from me. Just when I’d gotten used to it, my brother reappeared in the spring bloom.
I don’t know how he found me, ’cept that it was a town the size of a butter bean and if you looked hard enough you could find just about anyone. I was giving the babies tummy time in the truck bed, parked by our favorite strip of beach. A breeze roamed the air, rare for us, and every time it flushed the sky, Lion would open his mouth and laugh and Luck would sneeze. She’d just sneezed so hard she had to rest her little head on the blanket, her neck tired from resisting the sky above her so long, when Jayden walked up. I almost didn’t recognize him. He was fourteen and puberty had stretched him into somewhere closer to a man than the way I’d always thought of him, a small deer.
“Hi, Money,” he said, and his voice was stones beneath a foot, low and crackling.
I was prepared never to know my brother again. When you give up hope and then watch your biggest dream resuscitated on a windy day when you least expected it, it’s almost like meeting somebody once dead. And my ghost brother was standing in front of me with his hands stuck in his pockets and a question carved in his face.
“Can I…,” he started, coughing to shake the dips from his voice. “Can I hold ’em?” He shrugged toward the twins, both of their necks craned to look at him, this stranger making sound and breaking the usual echo of my voice and the rush of waves.
When my ghost spoke as soft as my brother, it rattled me so much I forgot to respond until the breeze returned and Lion laughed, Luck sneezed, and I stood. “Yeah. Yeah, of course.”
I jumped down from the truck bed, opened the back so he could sit with his legs dangling, and placed Lion in the crook of his arm. Then I gathered Luck and tucked her into his other arm so they was both cradled, his head switching from looking at one to the other, the twins’ toes touching so in his arms they made the shape of a heart out of his shoulders.
Jayden glanced up at me and his eyes was pooling. Soft boy. Raw heart.
“They perfect,” he breathed.
I smiled, remembering that day when they swam from inside me, when I chewed through their cords and touched their skin still damp with fluid. “That’s what I said.”
And in that one moment, my brother’s tears promised he would stay by me, to find a way to know me and the children that came from me, and I promised to forgive him for those months he didn’t know how to love me ’cause I knew what it was to be our parents’ child, to want them to think angel of us. I knew what it took for him to show up, a budding man, and take an ounce of the blame from the place it called home on my back and let it weigh down those shoulders that held tight to my children as the breeze rolled back in. Lion hiccupped, looked up at his uncle’s wet face. Luck sneezed, delicate and squeaky. Jayden smiled again.
One thing you gotta know is I’m resourceful. I built a whole world in the back of a truck and if I had to rid myself of a child with nothing but my hands and my Girls, I would. But I was running out of ideas.
April shrugged. “I don’t have extra,” she said. “None of us do.”
Jamilah’s daughter hung on her nipple and sucked. Jamilah shook her head.
I turned to Tori. “What about you? You weaning him, right?”
“Yeah, ’cause I got less milk the older he gets. Sorry, Simone. We can’t help you.”
I shook my head. This was the only thing I could think of, the milk, and even though I knew they’d all help me, ’cause I told ’em they owed me, which they did, I also knew they couldn’t produce milk just ’cause I said so.
Selling my extra milk was how I’d made enough money to fix up Tooth’s truck and turn it into a home back when the twins was infants. It didn’t require nobody thinking I was worth a hire, especially when the babies still needed me close enough to touch at all times. But eventually I caught a flu and my milk dried up and there was nothing left to sell.
I needed quick money for Planned Parenthood, and I knew I could rely on all those folks out there who had some kinda breast milk fetish, thought they could cure their eczema in a bath of some titty milk, or just didn’t have their own for their baby. The only thing I needed was the milk itself. And I had none.
“You know who’s got milk,” Crystal started, hesitant. “Emory.”
“No Emory. Not after last week.”
Crystal shrugged. “She’s got a freezer full of milk she won’t be able to do nothing with real soon.”
“I won’t do it,” I said. I wasn’t about to fold and call Emory. But I would call the next best thing, the person who could get me that milk without making me beg for it from the girl who hated me right now.
So I picked up the phone and called Jayden.
I was lucky he answered and luckier he hadn’t left for Panama City yet, was still dozing in bed. I knew ’cause I could hear Momma’s voice in the background and my throat throbbed. I asked Jay to come stop by the lake where we was parked and eventually he agreed.
An hour later, Jay’s white pickup pulled in, the back full of wood scraps and a brand new bassinet after I told him a father materializes with a binky and an armful of patience without never having to be called. He was a good dad. Great, even. If Emory let him, I knew he’d be there day and night through every feeding and fight to sleep. But since all he could do was show up every weekend with some cash and gifts, he never missed a chance.
Jayden stepped out, wifebeater and Timberlands on his skinny little body, and, like always, it hurt to see him. A pulsing ache like pushing a week-old bruise as he slunk toward me, neither of us knowing whether to hug or not and so we only did it halfway even though I wanted the whole thing. I wanted to be enveloped.
He stepped back and Jayden’s widow’s peak reached for me like a bird’s beak, his sideburns longer than the top of his head ’cause I wasn’t around to sit him down and buzz it even, ’cause we was living on two different planets in the same town. Lil Jayden grown half-big, got a job and a baby and still came home to a plate of Momma’s home-cooked pork and fresh sheets at the end of the day. Lil Jayden still nursing the heartbreak Emory left him with over and over again, still afraid to look at a woman with her nipple shoved into a child’s open mouth, still afraid to call himself afraid.
Jayden looked off into the line of pines and marsh noises to avoid looking at Jamilah, and he winced. “Damn, y’all couldn’t cover up before I came? I don’t wanna see that shit.”
“It’s just a titty,” I said. “You seen a titty before, right, Jayden?”
April giggled and Jayden looked down at his Timberlands. “Why you ask me to come here, Money?”
When Jayden was two, he couldn’t say my name, so he started saying Money instead, and even when his lisp faded, he kept calling me it. When our little sisters were born seven years after Jayden, they heard him call me Money so often they started calling me it too, thought it was my name.
“I need help. I don’t wanna tell you what for ’cause I don’t want no opinions about it, but I need some money and I decided to sell some breast milk, but I don’t got any. I need you to get Emory to give you her extra supply. But you can’t tell her it’s for me.”
“You want me, a grown man, to ask my girlfriend for some titty milk? And say it’s for me?”
“You ain’t grown,” Tori called, cackling. I glared at her and held my hand out in a warning.
“You know she’s not your girlfriend no more,” I said.
“Don’t matter what we is right now, she still mine.” Jayden’s forehead split into lines. “What happened? Y’all was tight last week and this week she’s callin’ you all kinds of names.”
I wanted to tell him what happened was his white-ass bitch walked up on me with some light-skinned girl I don’t know and then both of them got on my ass about something they shouldn’t have no opinion on. I wanted to tell him I had two babies before I got my own driver’s license, and I didn’t wanna have another the same year I had my first legal drink.
I wanted to tell Jayden that Momma and Pops treated me like salt water to gargle and spit out while he got everything, even if the salad girl was right and everyone else thought my everything was nothing at all. I wanted to tell him that I was so much more than she thought of me, than they all did, that when my babies looked at me, they saw infinity: a blood source, a tsunami of warmth, two arms to be tucked beneath.
But all I could get out was “She don’t respect me,” which I guess was true too.
Jayden scoffed. “She don’t respect nobody, Money. You know that.”
“Then why you still love her?” Emory and him never made sense to me. Out of all the girls in this town, why choose the one who doesn’t want you?
Jayden pulled his vape from his back pocket and took a puff into his mouth, still staring out at those trees like my face was too much for him. The only one he ever looked in the eyes was Emory.
“Well, she fine as fuck.” Jayden licked his lips and grinned, thinking I’d let him be this chickenshit, pretendin’ like he ain’t felt all he felt.
I shook my head. “We both know that girl got thin-ass fake blond hair and prob’ly ten generations of incest, boy. You don’t love her ’cause of how she looks and, if you do, it’s prob’ly just ’cause you don’t like yourself, huh? Or maybe ’cause you don’t like Momma? Or me? ’Cause Em just about the furthest-lookin’ thing from us you gonna get and you might be the only boy who wanted her even after she fucked you, so why, Jay? Why you still picking her flowers on your anniversary like she didn’t break up with you six months ago?”
Jay crunched a twig with the tip of his boot and looked at the ground before finally meeting my eyes. “I love her for the same reason you love Tooth.” He shrugged. “It’s easier to love her than to hate her.”
And that was when I couldn’t look at him no longer, when I shoved my hands inside the back pockets of my cutoffs and glanced back over at the Girls, all of ’em pretending they didn’t hear what Jayden said, and in this second, I knew it was true, but I also knew that admitting he was right wasn’t an option I could live with tomorrow, when Lion asked me if Daddy was gonna come by and eat s’mores with us and Luck used her hair to tie around her chin and said Look, Momma, I’m just like Daddy. Tomorrow, I needed to be able to nod and say Yeah, baby, Daddy can come help make sure your marshmallow don’t catch on fire. Yeah, baby, I’d love if you grew up to be just like him.
“You know I’m right. But if you don’t wanna know the answer to a question, it’s best not to ask it,” Jayden said. “Now, I ’preciate you callin’ me out here to ask for my help, but I can’t do nothing for you even if I wanted to. You know Emmy’s grandpa not gonna let me up in his house, even if I was willing to ask my girl for her milk.”
I rolled my eyes. “She’s still not your girl.”
He waved me off. “You go on and apologize to Emmy and she’ll let you have whatever you want.”
“I’m not sorry, though.”
“Don’t matter. You know all she needs is to hear you say it. She prideful.”
Before I could respond, Luck ran up behind me with a small bird’s nest in her hands and shouted, “Momma, Momma, Momma,” until I kneeled to look at it with her.
“Baby, there’s an egg in here,” I said. It wasn’t bigger than an eyeball, spotted and kind of green, and I bet she hadn’t never seen an egg like that before.
“To eat?” she asked, her eyelashes stretching to each end as she looked down at her nest. She was normally so prone to destruction, knocking down anything she could find and giggling, running in circles till she inevitably ran into the trunk of a tree. She was indestructible. But, with the nest, she was gentle, careful not to drop it, slow.
I shook my head. “No, Lucky, that birdie’s momma’s prob’ly looking for that egg ’cause that’s her baby, like you my baby. Where did you find it? Can you put it back for me so the momma birdie can find her baby?”
Luck pointed to a mulberry bush on the edge of some fence that’d been covered in vines and taken over in the past decades, the marsh consuming as it always did. Luck started half skipping back to the bush, her legs wanting to prance but her arms careful not to upset the nest or its egg. I straightened and looked back at Jayden.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll make good with Em. You still owe me a favor, though.”
Jayden nodded and looked like he might try to hug me again, but he didn’t. He turned around and walked straight to his truck, careful not to glance at the Girls and their titties as he reversed and disappeared into the trees.
It took a lot to get Emory to meet me, but when I reminded her that I’d held her stomach up with my hands those last weeks when Kai’s weight pulled at her back, that I’d seen the way one of her labia dangled when she spread her legs wide for me to wax it, that I’d sucked on her nipple just last week to get a clogged duct to flow again, she agreed to meet in the Walmart parking lot where her grammy worked.
I walked all the way from the lake, since I didn’t want to pack up the Girls and bring them all here. I’d sweated out all the beer and water I’d drank the night before by the time I got here, and the bag of Goldfish I’d brought to ease my nausea was empty when Emory came out of the Walmart entrance with Kai still strapped to her. She traipsed toward me, joined me where I was collapsed against the side of the store, and leaned against the trash can opposite me.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Emory said, trying to cross her arms but finding herself unable to with Kai’s body in the way. “You ruined everything. Adela doesn’t even wanna talk to me anymore, ’cause she says I’m just as crazy as you, but you know I’m not. You’ve always been the crazy one, your whole family is, and I’m done with it. Done.”
But Emory didn’t move, which meant she wasn’t done, she just wanted to see my face knot up. She wanted to see what I’d do next.
I tried to remember the good moments with Emory, when she sat beside me on the beach and wrote my name into the sand, when she knit Luck and Lion matching hats for their half birthday, when she consoled me in the middle of the night the last time Tooth forgot to pick up the kids for their fishing trip and I had to explain to them how a father can forget his children.
I heaved a breath and swallowed my contempt for all the worst parts of her, remembered in some backward way she was my sister. “I’m sorry I got so mad. I was drunk but I didn’t need to jump her or nothing, so I’m real sorry. I’ll apologize to her too, if you want.”
Emory looked at me, her lips still poking out, her eyebrow still bowing. “I get why you don’t wanna keep it. Trust me, I do.” She looked down at Kai and when she looked back up at me, her cheeks pillowy and red, she looked younger than she had since the day she felt her first Braxton-Hicks and wailed at me. “Just, try to be nicer, okay?”
I nodded, even though part of me still sorta wanted to punch her, but the other part of me wanted to hug her, so I compromised and did nothing. After a minute, she started to say goodbye, but I stopped her. “You know how you said you was happy to help me? Well, I need you. Actually, I need your milk.”
She looked down at her chest and back up at me, and even though we weren’t talking five minutes ago, I knew she’d do it for me. They all would. We understood what it was like to not have no help, to be entirely alone, but with each other we vowed not to leave, and as much as there was times when it didn’t feel like it, Emory was one of us. Always would be.