Simone
When I first learned I was having twins, I didn’t understand how that happened. I bet you think I’m dumb for that, but they don’t teach you this shit in school. At my twenty-week scan, I kept asking the doctor if they was identical and he kept shaking his head and explaining that if they was identical, the egg would’ve split in two. But my egg didn’t split, there was just two eggs that wanted to hole up in my womb, two placentas and two cords to go with them.
When I saw the pine tree sitting right in the center of the building I was supposed to be in, I thought of that day in the doctor’s office at fifteen, holding on to Tooth’s hand, imagining my egg splitting right down the center when really my babies were two separate things from the beginning, who’d both chose to exist in my body. Finding me at the same time, it was an act of fate. Not like this. This was the devil raining down.
The tree was cutting the building right in half like a knife, both sides empty and dark, and I guess I should’ve been happy it didn’t seem like no one was inside, but instead I felt dumb that I didn’t even consider they’d close down for the hurricane.
I tried calling them from the parking lot, again and again, but no one answered, and Emory, still holding on to my hand and shaking her knee in rhythm to the torrential rain, squeezed my palm after I hung up for the third time, reaching voicemail again.
“It’ll be okay, we can come back next week,” she said.
“No we can’t.” I ripped my hand away from hers and leaned my cheek against the glass. All sounds were muffled, like crystallized honey clogging my eardrums. “We both know they’re not gonna be able to fix it and open again for at least a few weeks, and by then I’ll be too far along, they won’t even give me the surgery. Fuck, Em. What am I supposed to do? I can’t have another one of his babies.”
Last night, I called Tooth to ask if he could take the twins today, and he started going off on me about how I don’t get to decide what he does, and then I heard a giggle in the background and I knew he’d found a new girl. I hung up and resolved that I would figure it out, do whatever it took, hurricane or not. For Luck and Lion. For me.
Emory came through today, having Jayden take Kai so she could come with me, and somehow managing to convince Adela to let us all stay with her, even after what I did. I was so close to making it all happen, to doing the thing they tell us not to do right before they scold us for daring to wear a tank top in the summer heat and reveal the bump that so shamelessly mocked them.
I was so close, after weeks of driving around and selling Emory’s frozen milk to whoever was willing to pay. I’d been so proud of that money, even if it wasn’t my milk, and I had just enough left over I could buy Luck and Lion a Christmas tree in two months. A small one, maybe two feet, and we’d have to keep it in the back of the truck, but I could already imagine seeing the bumpy roof of Lion’s mouth as he grinned wide at the sight of it.
But now all those dollar bills were worthless ’cause they couldn’t begin to pay for a lifetime with the thing I had fighting inside me and I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was Luck and Lion were hours away and they needed me, so I revved the truck again, swallowing the ache to scream, and didn’t listen when Emory suggested we wait for a pause in the rain.
The worst part of driving in a hurricane wasn’t actually the way the rain obscured even the few inches beyond the windshield, or the depth of the water you thought was just a puddle till you felt your front wheel dip all the way down into it, your back wheel sliding across and threatening to send you skidding. The worst part of driving in a hurricane was the wind.
The wind thrashed, tormented, made mockery of the weight of the truck, the slick dripping metal as it effortlessly blew us into the next lane. I had to wrestle, gripping the steering wheel, murmuring prayers and pleading for the wind to blow us forward, straight ahead, back to our children.
Motherhood was a constant supply of adrenaline, a goddamn phenomenon of logic, I thought, as I felt the wheels skid. I let up on the accelerator until I felt ground beneath us again.
I read a book once about a girl named Linda who escaped her plantation but stayed there, on the property, hiding in the crawl space for months. I read it, curled up in the library, Linda looking through the little hole and watching her children age down below, Linda waiting for opportunities even as they passed her by, heart caught like a hangnail on the hope of those babies, and I nodded. Yeah, that’s what it was. Motherhood made you believe blindly, hope endlessly, behave irrationally, as long as it meant those children tucked safely in the pocket of your love.
I was crazy, like Linda, and I knew it as I drove hours through the hurricane, but it didn’t matter none ’cause, for Luck and Lion, I lived in the promise I’d made the moment I’d birthed them: to pull a world that was good to them from the depths of its horrors. I owed them the impossible.
Emory clutched on to her seat beside me and shouted across the chorus of rain. “I don’t know if we can make it back like this.”
“We have to,” I said.
We didn’t get to make no different choices. That was motherhood. Emory was still new at it, considered for a moment letting Jayden and Kai stand outside my parents’ weighed-down trailer as he pleaded for them to let him inside. They wouldn’t, though, not with a child born outside of something bound by time, contract, history, and even if Jayden convinced himself they had all that, I saw the way Emory averted her eyes from him, the way they settled on Adela.
“What if we pulled over and called Adela, got her to go pick up the kids?”
I shook my head. Emory was being stupid, selfish. She didn’t get it like I did, like Linda did. And when she finally understood, I knew she’d wish she could go back to not knowing ’cause it’d be too much for her, suffocating on love. “Storm’s only getting worse and could last days. I don’t know ’bout you, but I can’t be leavin’ my kids without me like that, especially in some girl I don’t know’s house. If you want me to pull over and let you out, I will, but I’m going home.”
And then, in front of me, I saw what I thought might be a glimmer of sunset, a faint pulsing orange tint in the shadows beyond the rain. But Emory must’ve been able to see it for what it was ’cause she let out a hell of a screech, the kind of sound that didn’t need no words accompanying it ’cause it reached the body before I could even form a thought, and my hands whipped the steering wheel away from the glimpse of what was not a lowering sun but the blinking hazards of an SUV in what had been my lane, was supposed to be my lane, that car sunk into its own crater of water, unmoving, obstructing anything that dared to venture across a highway in a hurricane. I’d been one ripping eruption from Emory’s vocal cords away from slamming right into it, not seeing it until it was too late.
And, still, I didn’t have a choice but to drive on.
Emory didn’t speak again, didn’t protest even as we passed by two cars on the side of the road, the first car’s bumper battered to a naked scrape of silver and the second car’s wheels invisible beneath the small lake of water that had filled a crater-sized pothole. Made me think of Luck, throwing herself from the rope into the dune lake. Made me drive faster.
I knew we had to get home, that no matter what this thing inside me became, no matter what destruction the hurricane descended to wreak, we couldn’t think about nothing but the abyss of fear in a child’s pupils when they were sure their mother wasn’t gonna return.
“What about a coat hanger?” April offered.
I’d been thinking the same thing, I think we all had. Still, no one responded, let the sound of the rain resound in Adela’s basement, where we gathered, spread out, blankets protecting our skin from the cold of the linoleum.
Adela finally shook her head. “I don’t mean to interfere or anything, but…” She glanced at me and when I didn’t glare, she continued, “A coat hanger is only a good idea if you want to risk bleeding out down here. And even if I didn’t care if you stained my noni’s floor, I don’t think you want to let your kids watch that.”
Adela retreated back to her hunched spot under her blanket, leaned up against her sofa bed, the same position she’d been in since I gave her the handmade sea bands, and she put them on her wrists and sank into the relief of not feeling nauseous for the first time in months.
When we all came down here and Tori pulled out the liquor and weed from her pockets, ready to get the party started, I could tell Adela hadn’t realized we’d be partying, hadn’t never thought you could do nothing in a hurricane but stare at the wall and pray your house didn’t get swept away. But since she had the bands on, she’d never looked so relaxed.
It was night now and we had candles scattered around the room, everyone trying to keep a hand or a flashlight on each kid before they ended up sucking on some exposed pipe. Emory was as close to Adela as she could get without intruding on Adela’s blanketed sphere, and I could tell by the way she leaned that she wanted to be closer. We’d barely made it back when the rain picked up and if I wasn’t panicking about the inevitability of my life, I’d be grateful just to be dry.
Emory nodded. “Adela’s right, it’s not smart.”
I looked up at her and, for just a moment, let her see it all. The creeping suspicion that I would not get to have a choice in this, that a child would be born and no matter how much I loved that baby, another child would take something from me and my children’s lives that could never be returned. Like a lost tooth, you can get a fake one put in, metal screwed into the base of a gum, but your body can never forget what is missing, the bone that could have been in its place. I whispered, just loud enough they could all hear, “I don’t know what else to do.”
“What about the vacuum suction thingy? They could take it out like that after they fix up the clinic in a few weeks, right?” Jamilah proposed.
Crystal took a sip of her beer. “I wouldn’t count on it. They can’t do nothing for you after fifteen weeks, it’s the law, and how far along are you, Simone?”
“Eleven weeks.”
Tori nodded. “Yeah, I wouldn’t risk that. What about a different clinic?”
“The next closest clinic is in Mobile and they don’t do abortions. And even if I could do a six-hour drive to somewhere else, the limits in the next four states are even less than fifteen weeks. I don’t got that kinda time.”
“So what do we do? If the clinic’s not an option and you won’t use no coat hanger, what are you supposed to do?” Jamilah asked.
I kissed the top of Lion’s head as he flipped through a picture book in my lap, a flashlight tucked under his little chin.
Crystal set Cece’s sleeping frame onto a blanket on the floor. “My grandmama told me something when I was pregnant, about how her sister got knocked up by some white man when she was young and her mama made her a special tea. I think it was made of sage or something, and her blood came just like that. I wanted my Cecilia, but Grandmama said that plenty of women in the family’d done the same and nothing bad happened as long as nobody went around blabbing about it.”
I nodded, remembering something. “I read in some book, years ago, about cotton root being used for centuries to make your period come, back when our families was bred like chickens in a slaughterhouse.” I tucked a curl on Lion’s head behind his ear and glanced over to check that Luck was still fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube beside me. “But it don’t matter ’cause I don’t know where I’d find any of that shit anyway. I can’t tell the difference between no eucalyptus and bay leaf.”
I guess it’s fitting that Adela would be the one to destroy me and save me at once, to come in at all the right and wrong times and change everything, and this time, when she spoke up, I could imagine the thing inside me breaking open like the tree through the clinic building, this time at my own hands, a welcome spill.
“My noni grows a whole bunch of herbs and plants and she dries them out and puts them in jars. I’ve only ever seen one or two because she keeps most of them in her bedroom, but I bet she’d have something. Em, you know plants, right?”
Emory tilted her head closer to Adela. “I know animals mostly, but I know a little about some plants. Rue might work if you can’t find anything else. And you’d wanna make it a tea but don’t put too much in, ’cause these plants are toxic, that’s why they can kill a baby. You wanna make sure it doesn’t kill you too.”
“How much is too much?” Adela asked.
We all looked at each other, eyes to eyes, and found no answer. We wouldn’t get one, couldn’t, would have to walk in blindly like only a mother knows how to do. All their eyes landed on me and waited for me to decide, a final declaration of what I wanted, what I was willing to do for myself, for my children.
You might think it’s dangerous, naive, misguided, to do it like this, but it is more dangerous to birth a child into this world unwanted. At least it was to me and, at the end of this hurricane, I was gonna be the only one who had to sit in that truck with what I’d done.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me how to get these herbs from your grandmama.”