Adela
When the rain started to pound, Noni entered her hurricane zone. She guzzled a sleeping tonic, lit candles around the house, said a prayer in each room, and then went into her bedroom, swearing she wouldn’t be coming out until the hurricane was over.
I’d never snuck anywhere in my life. I’d lied to find a loophole, created a story about where I was going and who I was going with, but I’d never opened a door I wasn’t supposed to walk through and tried not to make a sound.
I cracked the door to Noni’s room, Simone right behind me, and found Noni where she said she’d be, asleep in bed and fully dressed, in raincoat and boots like she was prepared to brave the storm even in her slumber. My heart crackled in my chest, and I wasn’t sure I should be doing this, breaking the only rule Noni gave me: not to go into her room. But Simone was with me and she needed this, so I waited a moment, then when I was sure Noni wasn’t going to wake up, we slipped fully inside and finally got a full view of the room.
Noni’s room wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. Her whole house was full of things that had seemingly no place or purpose, piled on any available surface, and I thought her room would be more of the same, but it wasn’t.
Bookshelves lined the walls, but there were no books. Instead, the shelves were occupied by mason jars containing all kinds of things meant to live outdoors and now dead and shoved into glass in my grandmother’s bedroom: leaves and liquid, strange fluff and flower petals. Her room was bare and painted eggshell white, blank and still as an empty pool, the only decoration her wall of jarred plants.
Sage, cotton root, rue. I didn’t know what any of them looked like. I glanced back at Simone and shrugged, so she stepped toward the shelves and started to read labels. I joined her on the other shelf. Raspberry leaf, black cohosh root, mint. Pine bark, sassafras, turpentine oil. Finally, rue. I grabbed the jar and unscrewed it, leaning my head in.
The smell leaped out and slapped me. I gagged and screwed the top shut again. It was sour, dried leaves tangled in the jar like a bird’s nest, making it feel almost hopeful, a false sense that it could save you.
Simone was holding a jar full of clary sage leaves, and our eyes met. She looked different than she had at the lake over a month ago now, different than she’d looked when she slipped the nausea bands on my wrists in the basement only hours before. There was a determination planted squarely in her eyes and, right behind it, a cave of fear black as oil, and I understood her for the first time.
She was battling the same thing as me, watching herself expand, and I imagined for a moment what it would be like to be as brave as her, to choose something that would shed all the complication from my life. Let myself lay my head on Chris’s chest in his twin bed and focus on trivial things, tracing his tattoos, arguing with his roommates, laughing at the smirk painting his face right before he tried to undress me.
But that was not the life I was barreling toward, and I realized it wasn’t the one I would choose anyway. If the baby wasn’t taking refuge in my body, I would be back home in a pool, breaking down muscle after muscle just to reconstruct them bigger and better than they’d been before. Without this baby, there was no reality of Chris or Emory or the winding shores of Florida where the ocean I’d discovered caressed its sand. And for the first time ever, I was grateful for it and all that it had given me. Even Simone.
The air bubbles began to percolate, small at first, floating to the surface, simmering up from the bottom of the pot as we waited in the kitchen, Simone and I fixated on it, close enough to Simone’s camp stove to feel it warm our cheeks.
“How did you know?” I asked her.
“Know what?” Simone wasn’t as defensive as she had been when I first met her and, as we watched the bubbles follow each other up to the surface of the water, I started to think Emory might’ve been right, that she wasn’t so bad after all.
“That you wanted to keep your twins.” I nodded to the mug half-full of sage and rue and cotton root, ready for hot water. “That you didn’t want to keep this one.”
I knew I was going to carry this pregnancy through until the day the child pressed into my pelvis and begged to see light, but I didn’t know what I might do after that. I’d been thinking about it a lot, as my image of my future bleared like the sky awash with hurricane.
The closer I got to Chris, the further I got from Indiana and David and chasing gold. Now I dreamed in the emerald hue of the Gulf, rushed to call Emory after every episode of Shark Tank and tell her a new idea I had, started to wonder if this baby’s nose would be hooked or round or flat. If it would be mine or not.
Simone looked away from the pot to me. “I’m different than I was when I had Luck and Lion. Older. Better. And, if I coulda given them this version of me for those first years, I would’ve. But I didn’t know that back then. All I knew was the man who loved me wanted those babies and I couldn’t help but want them too, and I’m real glad I did, don’t get me wrong, but now I know different, and I bet if I had this baby now, in ten years I’d wish they coulda had that version of me instead. So maybe that’s why. But…”
Simone trailed off and looked into the mug. When she returned to look at me, her brows knit together. “But maybe the real reason is I just got a feeling. It’s not the right time, not the right person, shit, maybe it’s not the right baby. All I know is I don’t wanna give my body to this child, trade my idea of my life for something else in the name of someone else. Maybe the only real reason I got is I’m tired and I don’t wanna give up nothing else.”
I tapped a nail on the counter in rhythm to the rain and thought about it. I knew I was going to give my body to this child and, honestly, it was a relief, to not wake up before dawn to freeze in an indoor pool without even a view of the rising sun, to eat whatever was put in front of me and not worry about how I might morph. It was after the baby was born that I wasn’t sure about, an option Simone never had.
“If you could’ve given the twins to someone else, someone who would have been good to them, would you have?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know if I can answer that ’cause now they mine. They’ll never be nothing but mine to me. But if I coulda had it different, I woulda wanted to raise my babies where I grew up, with my momma and my pops, and I coulda learned how to open a business or just slept in sometimes and not worried ’bout what would happen if Lion learned how to climb out of the truck in the middle of the night and ran toward the water.
“But really you gotta ask what you want for yourself. ’Cause me, back then? I don’t think I wanted nothing different, woulda been somebody’s momma one way or another, my sister’s or my boyfriend’s or my child’s. But now? I want different now. You can’t predict what’s gonna happen, Adela, but you can take a good look at yourself and be honest about who you are and what you’re willing to give for what you want. At least that’s what I’m doing.”
The pot began to rumble and then all those small bubbles became larger currents of air filling the basin, and I turned off the burner. Simone took the hot water and poured it into her mug, and we watched the water brown until it was the color of dune lake water. We both looked to each other, a silent prayer that we had put just enough in, not too little or too much, before Simone blew into the cup and gulped.