Emory
Adela was sent here just for me. I knew it from the minute I saw her. Her pregnancy just confirmed it.
I mean, I’d been compelled by the nature of life since I was born. Not how or when we became, but why we became. The specific natural selection that made us into ourselves. How our cells arranged to create life capable of enduring the hellscape that was this world. It fascinated me, always had.
Pawpaw was a believer in not asking questions, trusting God had it handled. He thought science was the crutch we leaned on to justify all our bullshit. There were times I agreed with him, mostly when I was trying to explain something that just didn’t make no sense, but that was before Adela.
When Adela showed up at my door with an ultrasound photo, I knew it was more complicated than anything Pawpaw thought. I mean, I couldn’t fight the undeniable nature of destiny that was Adela on my porch. But it wasn’t just destiny. Life was the meeting of an organism’s undying persistence to survive and that funny little thing called faith. I believed it now.
Adela, pregnant. I had to admit, there was a sliver of me that was jealous of whoever had a claim to that baby, to being a part of her forever. But mostly, I was grateful for all the seconds that collided into moments and then days of me and Adela, together. My best friend. The salvation of a life that had been chipping at all its edges since Kai was born.
But I’d seen how quickly Adela could leave, so I didn’t let myself get too comfortable. Like a penguin on a bed of ice floating toward the equator, I thought every day might be my last with her, and when I woke up to her text or call or face in the hallway at school searching for me, I had to remind myself that life endured, that she was here for a reason and, at least for the moment, she was mine.
Moments with Adela when we were alone, sitting at a picnic table during lunch or wading into the Gulf or splayed across the cold floor in her bedroom, kept me satiated for all the other moments when she wasn’t around. When Mrs. Simmons brought me into her office each week, insisting I wasn’t allowed to bring Kai to school. When I returned home in the evenings and Pawpaw started going at me about how I never cleaned Kai’s spit-up and how it was all over the carpet in the living room like his beer hadn’t already turned it brown and sour. When Jay called me, pleading for me to get back with him, as if I could ever do that with Adela here. I wasn’t lonely anymore. For the first time in my life, I had a best friend.
Every time I got to hear Adela’s giggle or watch her scarf down some food, I felt the life return to me. But I knew she would be gone soon, for an hour or a day or maybe forever, so I had to store whatever I had of her inside me. Like a cactus stores its water in its core. Rationing to my veins through mirages of her skin around the corner of a hallway and the sound of her velvet voice in the deep parts of the night as Kai screamed.
Adela disappeared for periods of time, in the mornings and on the weekends. She wouldn’t even answer her phone. I would go by her house and ask her grandmother where she was and her grandmother would always say, “She’s with her friend from the pool,” but when I asked Adela who her friend from the pool was, she shrugged and said, “No one.” I didn’t want to push her away, so I left it at that, thinking maybe she was just alone, in the water somewhere, away from her phone.
But on the weekdays, she was mine. I used every second I had with her, asking her to read my college essays, showing her how to burp a baby, and trying again and again to get her to give Simone and the Girls another chance.
It was on one of these weekends when Adela disappeared, October and the peak of storm season, when we started hearing murmurings of the hurricane. With it, as though Kai could feel it coming, a fever came over him.
I wouldn’t wish a sick infant on no one, no one at all. He’d cry with such ferocity, his lips turned blue. His sharp nails clawed at his cheeks and ears and hair and then turned to scratch at my cheeks and ears and hair, forcing me to suffer with him. There was no end to it. No matter how many lullabies I sang. No matter the forceful push with which I stuck my nipple in his wide, sobbing mouth. The cries wouldn’t stop.
He’d sleep for only ten or twenty minutes at a time before he’d start writhing in a lazy sweat and his eyes would blink open mid-roar. I had no idea this much sound could erupt from such a small body, this much sickness could circulate inside a person so new.
I skipped school on Monday, then Tuesday. Adela called each day asking where I was, when I’d be back, and I had nothing to tell her. The fever would die down only to return again at night. In the middle of the night on Tuesday, Pawpaw banged on the door to my room and then swung it open, his hair a frizzy disaster around his bald spot, his eyes manic.
“I can’t do it no more,” he said. “Y’all gonna have to leave first thing tomorrow.”
I was on the bed blowing cold air into Kai’s face to try to get him to cool down, so exhausted I couldn’t make sense of what Pawpaw was trying to say.
“What do you mean, leave?”
Pawpaw held his head in his hands, his eyes glancing wildly around the room. “I can’t get no sleep with him cryin’ all day and night and with this storm comin’ I won’t be trapped inside with no sick baby, I just can’t be doin’ that, not at my age.”
“Pawpaw, you’re only in your sixties.” I continued blowing on Kai, but when Pawpaw didn’t leave in a huff, I looked back up at him, and he was serious. “Where do you want me to go? You can’t kick me out in a hurricane.”
“Don’t be a sidewalk sissy now, Emory. Go stay with one of those girls, call his daddy, I don’t really give a rat’s behind where it is you go, sweetheart. Just get out my house so I can get some gosh darn sleep.” Pawpaw slammed the door shut behind him, which, of course, only made Kai cry harder and I was right there with him, our tears running into a single wet pool on my chest.
On Wednesday, they shut the school down. All the nonessential businesses closed up. Sandbags were laid out, people clutched their children close, and I stood out in the warm, dense rain, attempting to hold on to the umbrella in the wind only for it to blow upward and let all that rain rush in on us.
When Jay pulled up, I swung my bag full of Kai’s stuff into the middle seat of the truck cab, closed the umbrella and flung it into the footwell, and climbed in. The moment of rain on Kai’s head quieted him for a moment, but once I shut the car door, the little demon in him reemerged and he cried so hard the purple veins at the back of his throat showed.
Jay beamed at me, one hand on the steering wheel. “This fate, Emmy. I got the day off work, and I was just thinking ’bout you when you called.”
I glared at him. “Your son’s so sick I haven’t slept in days, we’re in the middle of a hurricane, and I just got kicked out of my house. It’s not fate, Jay, it’s karma.”
I shoved Kai into his arms, and he took him with ease. Jay was too nice about it all. It made it hard to resent the fact that I had to deal with his child all day and all he had to do was send me some money every week and beg for my love.
I knew that wasn’t entirely fair. I mean, Jay would drop anything for Kai and me. But all I had to keep a border drawn between me and him was a curdling resentment and I wasn’t about to let my guard down.
“His doctor’s expecting him at urgent care, thinks maybe he’s got an ear infection or something, but you’re gonna need to take him,” I said. “Your sister needs me to go do something with her, but I can meet you back at Beach Row right after I’m done. I know it’ll be tight with us all in the trailer, but I really appreciate your parents coming around.”
Jay glanced away from me, at the steering wheel. That’s how I knew him saying his ma had changed her mind and they were gonna let me and Kai stay with them was false. He just wanted to get us in his car, orchestrate a second chance for him as though we’d ever had a real shot the first time. He lied to me.
“Are you fucking kidding me—” I started.
Jay folded. “I’m so sorry, Emmy, it’s just I was working up to talking to ’em when you called, and I was sure they’d be fine with it. But when I asked Momma and Pops, they said they can’t have y’all with us. But we can still meet at the Beach Row entrance later. I’ll just keep Kai in the car till then.”
I shouldn’t’ve believed him in the first place. His family didn’t have space for me and Kai inside usually, didn’t want us anyway, but I figured it would be different in a hurricane.
“And you just said okay, I’ll let my baby and his mother sleep out in a hurricane?” I crossed my arms. “You’re such a pussy sometimes.”
This morning, Simone called and said that they were all planning on staying at Tori’s boyfriend’s place, but his place was already flooding and now none of the Girls had nowhere to stay, and Simone’s appointment was this afternoon. They were all camping out in the hospital waiting room, but eventually someone would notice they didn’t have anyone to visit and then we’d all be out cowering in the dunes, us and the kids. Jay was my last option, at least the last one I thought might work. I shook my head. I could barely look at him. Now I’d have to go to the only person I had left and ask her something that might make her hate me again.
Jay tried to lean over and kiss my neck, but I pushed him away, fishing into my backpack and pulling out two full bottles. “Take Kai to the doctor in an hour. Feed him every two hours, burp him after, and try to get him to go to sleep. I’ll pick him up from Beach Row before dark and don’t worry, I won’t try to come inside.”
I grabbed the umbrella and leaned in to kiss Kai’s forehead. As I opened the door to get out, Jay’s voice broke—“Emmy, wait”—but I closed it in his face. I wasn’t sure how many more times I could handle breaking this boy’s heart. It was getting plain embarrassing, for the both of us. Like Pawpaw sometimes said, if Jay fell in a barrel of tits, he’d somehow come out suckin’ his own thumb. But he kept on divin’ anyway. And I was getting real tired of turning him away.
I waited on Adela’s front porch until the red door opened and her face showed pale. She’d been throwing up again.
“I’ve been texting you for days. Are you okay?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Come inside.” She opened the door wider for me, but I stayed on the porch under the sliver of protruding roof keeping me dry. Adela’s eyebrows reached for each other in the center of her face. “What’s wrong? Where’s Kai?”
“With his dad. Look, I’m gonna ask you something and I need you to consider it, okay? Can you do that?”
She leaned forward and I wanted to fold against her chest and beg her to take me in, but the rain was pouring behind me and I knew if I did that, if I overstepped, I’d be worse off than I was laying out in the flood of rain. After all, she was my drinkable water, and there was no life without her.
“Of course. Are you sure you don’t want to come inside, just to stay dry?”
I shook my head again. “In about five minutes Simone’s gonna pull up and I’m gonna need to go with her to Tallahassee to the clinic and, when we come back, we’re gonna pick up the kids and the other Girls and then we’re not gonna have nowhere to go.” I paused, looked up at her. “Can we stay with you? Just till the storm’s over?”
Adela leaned back. “All of you?”
I nodded, sniffed in the wet, electric air.
Adela crossed her arms. “You can stay. My noni’s taking some kind of sleeping pill, she won’t even know you’re here. The Girls can stay too. Just not Simone. Not after what she did to me.”
I was considering saying okay, thanking her and falling into her arms, but then Simone’s red truck pulled up outside the line of trees around Adela’s house. I could feel the engine, the buzz of my phone with the text I knew Simone had sent telling me to hurry up. I pictured Simone and the twins in the back of the truck tonight. Rainwater filling the truck bed till they were swimming in it. I couldn’t leave Simone like that.
I clasped my hands together. “Please, Adela. She’s pregnant, just like you, and she found a way outta it, that’s why we gotta go to Tallahassee, so she can have her appointment to get the pills, and I can’t let her do that alone. What if it was you? What if it was me? How could you let me do that alone?”
She stared at me and I couldn’t read her. She got like that sometimes, cold and judging, analyzing me with those narrow eyes, and that’s when I was most aware of how much I needed Adela. At the possibility of rejection planted deep inside her eyes.
“If it was you,” she started, “I wouldn’t let you do it alone. But if you were me, what would you do? She attacked me, Emory.” Adela placed her hand on her stomach, where the smallest slope was growing.
I thought about it. If I was Adela, if my skin glowed like that, if I had those mountains of muscle on my back and a chin that never dropped, would I let a girl who pounced on me in my house? I wasn’t even sure Adela thought of Simone as a girl, as much as she thought of her as that alligator she’d tried running zigzag from: something set out to hurt her, as though it was in its nature. If I thought a creature built to kill was after me, I wouldn’t let it in my house till it proved it could do something besides terrorize me. That there was something in it distinctly kind, caring. Human.
“What if Simone could help your nausea?” I said. “She did it for me, when I was pregnant, did it for all of us who had it real bad, and if you let her, she’d help you. I know she would.”
Adela’s top lip curled inward, and her voice got low. “The medication the doctor gave me was the only thing that helped but it made me so dizzy I couldn’t even see, so I stopped taking it. How am I supposed to believe some crazy girl could fix something a doctor couldn’t?”
I shrugged. “ ’Cause Simone’s had to survive without nobody to help her.” My phone buzzed again, Simone growing impatient. “Either way, I can’t stay with you if you won’t take all of us in. I won’t.”
Adela stared at me, deciding whether or not to test my bluff, and then she opened her arms, reached out for my hand, and brushed her thumb across my palm. “Okay,” she said. “Simone can come too.”
In moments like these, the way I felt about Adela didn’t make any sense, not even to me. Maybe this was what true friendship was like, when your body overflowed like a pond after rainfall, fish spilling from my stomach, jumping and flailing out of the water. When there was no way to contain all the life in you and you almost didn’t care.
All I wanted was to be close to her. Kindred spirits or whatever. But sometimes I thought it might just be me. Maybe I was overly attached to Adela. Even now, on her steps, the urge to hug her slashed through me when anybody else would’ve just smiled and said thank you. I didn’t know how to make sense of it, so I just squeezed her hand once.
“Thank you,” I said. She smiled at me, and I squeezed her hand one more time before backing off the porch, into the rain, dashing beneath the canopy of trees to Simone’s truck, and slamming the truck door shut behind me to keep out the rain.
When I looked over at Simone, I could see the fear ripe on her face.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “She’ll take us.”
Simone’s face arched. “Me too?”
I nodded. “She’s not what you think, Simone. You’ll see.”
Simone didn’t protest as she pulled out onto gravel awash with water, sped down the road to the highway, where we both gazed in front of us as far as we could see.
It was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock. That rain pounded and spit at the windshield, both of us bracing for the next moment and then the next, when the rain would tornado us, not taking a single real breath till we pulled into the parking lot behind the Planned Parenthood, and when I saw it I reached for Simone’s hand, the way I knew I’d want her to hold mine, the way I knew I’d insist on holding Adela’s if this was her, and for the first time since I’d met Simone, she didn’t shove me off, ’cause she saw it too and it was devastating.
Right through the center of the clinic building, a tree had fallen. I looked over at Simone and I thought I saw a tear glisten in her right eye, but I never saw it fall.