Simone
A bathtub without water feels like a cold palm, cradling you frozen. Capable of one squeeze that could kill you. All I wanted was a little warm water and, even if the Girls could boil some, Emory wouldn’t let ’em, not even when I begged, clammy sweat accumulating beneath my titties from the grip of cramps splitting in my pelvis.
“I’m sorry,” Emory whispered, wiping my forehead with a cold wet rag. “You might get an infection if I add water.”
Emory was crying too, and I couldn’t handle that shit, so I snapped at her to stop and even though the tears kept bubbling up in her eyes, she paused them right at the edge of her waterline.
Nobody ever told me it would hurt like this. Maybe it didn’t, if you did it the right way, but the only right way was the way that ended with me the only living thing in my body. You can judge all you want, except anybody who had to swallow that pain knows it was far from the easy way out.
I felt the next seize approaching in my low back and I could feel this one was gonna collapse me. Through my teeth, I groaned, “Don’t. Let. Them. Hear.” I looked to the bathroom door. Behind it, April, Jamilah, and the kids were caught in the tide of sleep and, out of all the Girls on this side of the door, Adela seemed to understand.
I just didn’t want my kids to hear me cry.
She scrambled from her spot kneeling at the foot of the tub, scavenging through cabinets in the bathroom, the flashlight in her grip dimming as it got closer to death, and she found a clean sponge right as the height of the wave took me over, stuffing it in my mouth as I ripped into another guttural roar. The sound couldn’t be heard past the hums Tori and Crystal began singing to me.
When I drank up that tea, I was ready for the pain, for the rusty metal flavor of blood, and yet I’d sat there in Adela’s basement for hours and nothing happened. I’d started to think it wasn’t gonna work and I was gonna have to have this child and tell Tooth and adjust to the idea that whatever was cooking up inside me was gonna become a baby, my baby, and as the Girls played Truth or Dare, my mind wandered off to whether the baby would be a boy or a girl.
I thought it would be a girl, couldn’t imagine anything but a girl, wondered whether that girl, at fifteen, would learn the precise method of measuring the area of a circle or what it felt like when you realized, mid-fuck, a grown man was inside you and you’d welcomed him to be there.
I met Tooth the way anybody meets anybody in this town: by the water.
I was fifteen and Momma let me wear a bikini for the first time in my whole life as long as I wore a cover-up over it, and I’d strutted onto the beach, tugging Jayden and my sisters behind me. Jayden was newly thirteen and the twins were six and Momma told me I had to take them to the beach while she cleaned up ’cause she just needed a break.
I wasn’t happy to be stuck with the kids, so I made them bring their boogie boards and, when we got to the beach, I took off my cover-up and told Jayden to keep an eye on the twins while I took a walk. That’s all it was, really, just a walk.
I’d planned on finding a nice, quiet place to sit and read my book—I was starting to read bell hooks’s All About Love at the time, ’cause the librarian at school told me all young people should read something by ms. hooks, and it was as good as anything at occupying my attention while the sun greeted my belly button for the first time in a decade—and so I got to walking along the winding shore where the sand was tamped down by the sea and my feet didn’t sink too far into it.
The Gulf diverted about two miles east and I hadn’t realized I’d walked that far until suddenly I was following a path inland, where the wind blew the sea into the channel leading to the dune lake.
I climbed up the sand and right by where the channel flared into the lake, I saw Tooth. His feet planted on the small dock right before the marsh grass took over and his hands firmly stuck to the handle of his fishing rod as he cranked it, front teeth biting over his lip, his shoulder muscles shaking.
I stood there and watched him as he reeled it in, the fish flying through the air and his hand reaching out for it, grabbing it by the inside of the mouth and releasing it from the hook. It was a good-sized trout, a little less than a foot, and I wasn’t gonna go up to him, I really wasn’t, but then he did something I never expected. He took the fish he’d just fought the cramp of his muscles for, kneeled at the edge of the water, and released it back into the lake.
What I didn’t know at the time was that he didn’t let that fish go out of some sort of mercy. He released the fish back into the water she came from ’cause she was too small to be worth all the scaling, what it took to make a fish ready to eat. He wanted something bigger.
I was fifteen, though, and I was intrigued by the cute guy fishing alone, his kind fingers, his bare stomach, and so I kept walking up the sand to the dock till he looked over and saw me. And when he saw me, he flashed a smile.
“Love, huh?”
My face grew warm. “What?”
He laughed and his crowned tooth glinted in the sun. “The book. You lookin’ for love?”
It was my turn to laugh, embarrassed, and I was about to tell him no, but I didn’t want him to think I was closed off or nothing, so I straightened my neck and said, “Maybe. How ’bout you?”
His eyes traced over me. Moles, stomach, ashy shins, before returning to my eyes. He was as handsome as all my friends said, the bait boy sending tremors through me as he shrugged. “Who couldn’t use a little more love?” He said it so soft it sounded like poetry, and I’d always loved a symphony of words. “You ever been fishin’?”
I glanced back at where I’d come from, thinking of Jayden and the twins, probably still out in the water on their boards, not even aware I was gone, then I looked down at the book, before finding Tooth’s eyes again. They were pinned on me. I shook my head, smiled back.
“Teach me.”
I never did finish the book. Maybe if I had, things would’ve turned out different.
Once I got Lion to sleep early in the night, while the Girls were still mid Truth or Dare, I started to think maybe I would have a boy. Maybe that boy would grow up and do to some girl what Tooth had done to me, whatever it was he’d done, and I knew that I would still love that boy with all of me, but, God, I would feel disgusted at the sight of him too.
I still don’t know the exact day I conceived the twins, since I was with Tooth damn near every day and he insisted his balls would color blue if we didn’t get down to business the moment I walked in the door. I should’ve known it would happen eventually, but I was young and Tooth didn’t like condoms and he always pulled out right in time. It’s funny, making the same mistake twice. Somehow, I still thought it was impossible, that there wasn’t no way I could get pregnant by the same man twice. But I did, and, this time, I knew the exact day I conceived ’cause it was the last time I ever let Tooth touch me.
Tooth and I weren’t together, not really, but I wouldn’t say we was broken up neither. We was in limbo, and I both angered at his scent and melted into him at the sight of his eyes registering me, his words tracing me like that first time at the beach. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it, and like a tsunami, it devoured everything in sight. I couldn’t help it. But I’d sworn, mostly to Emory, that I wouldn’t fuck him again, and I’d kept that vow for two months before the day I broke it.
I didn’t do it ’cause I wanted him back and it wasn’t a hate-fuck, not really. I did it ’cause he was all I had left from my childhood, messed up as it was, and that day I’d been reminded of that with a quick blow to the gut.
It was summer and I’d finally gotten around to filling out all the Obamacare documents, so I could finally take the twins to the pediatrician. I felt bad ’cause I hadn’t taken them since a few weeks after they was born, but at least I was doing it now, and I walked into the same doctor’s office I’d gone to my whole life, each of my babies holding on to one hand, as I told them about how they’d get a lollipop or something from the doctor and secretly hoped they’d give me one too.
We was sitting there, Luck and Lion playing in the kids’ corner as I filled out all kinds of forms for them, waiting on the doctor, and that’s when Momma and Pops walked in, Jayden trailing behind them.
I heard Pops’s voice before I saw his frame, him spitting, “And what if you got some kinda STD from that white girl? You getting tested, boy.”
Jayden was two weeks to eighteen and I should’ve known they’d try to get him in to see the pediatrician before he had to switch doctors, should’ve asked Jayden when his appointment was so we didn’t accidentally overlap, but by the time they walked into the waiting room, it was too late.
I stiffened. Momma and Pops both stopped in the doorway when they saw me, before Momma’s eyes glazed over and she walked straight to three open seats and sat down, grabbing an Essence magazine and beginning to flip through. Pops followed her, casting his eyes to the small TV displaying a baseball game in the corner, and that left Jayden.
I knew he wasn’t gonna come say hi to me or the kids, not even when they looked up and noticed their uncle JJ was standing there and ran to him. He said, “Go back to your momma,” and turned away, sat down beside my parents. Later, he told me he just didn’t want more trouble, as if Momma or Pops would ever punish him. He had always been their cherished son, always would be. It wasn’t more than five minutes before the nurse called us back and, by the time we returned to the waiting room, Momma, Pops, and Jayden were already gone.
Afterward, I drove the kids to Tori’s boyfriend’s place, where she, Crystal, and their kids were spending the day, and left Luck and Lion there for the afternoon. Then I got back in the truck and beelined straight for the bait shop, where I found Tooth in the back room, just like I had every afternoon five years before, and I climbed on top of him and fucked him, thinking it would make me feel like someone wanted me still, like I was fifteen and things were still right. But it didn’t. All I felt was Tooth’s thumb on my windpipe, his teeth on my nipple, his shout as he came, before I slipped out of the room with his cum still sticky on my thighs.
Now, in this tub, I was sure that it was working, that this is what it felt like to expel, and this fetus, this would-be child, would never become a girl or a boy. It would not learn to dance or bake a cake that was the perfect balance of moist and sweet or find a thing that they wanted so much they would make a choice they wished didn’t need making just to have it. And, in this moment, I was okay with that.
I let my head drift to rest on the back of the tub, Emory rewetting the rag and dabbing my forehead, the Girls humming tunes I couldn’t place and didn’t need to as I gripped the porcelain and closed my eyes.
The cramping escalated and I had to spit out the sponge and vomit into the plastic bowl Adela kept bath bombs and unused rubber duckies in and I felt unbearably close. Closer to myself than I’d ever been, all the tenderness of youth and harshness of womanhood crashing into each other, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive this unless I let go of it all.
So I stopped fighting the hurt and let the raging vibrations take me. I slipped into a trance with the Girls’ hums, closed my eyes and imagined the sound of hurricane rain outside was actually dune lake water, something alive, holding me up, waiting to capture my blood and disperse it into the ocean through a small channel that withstood all odds just to exist.
I expected the blood to come all at once, for it to flow straight out like a hose from my insides. But that’s not what happened. It took at least an hour before I saw blood, waves clamping on to my abdomen and twisting, felt like hands, my body wrung out like wet clothes.
That first hour, nothing came, just cramps, and then, in the second hour, clots of blood the size of marbles and then quarters and then golf balls, the pain relentless, my hairline matted in sweat, limbs shaking, reminding myself to keep quiet and not wake the babies up.
My body forced me to push, just like it had almost five years ago, and part of me worried a live child would emerge, a full-grown baby cooked up from not even three months inside the womb, that I would have to raise that child or kill it with my own hands. But no child came out. Instead, the things that came from each push did not even equate to the breath it took to evict them, small gray bits of flesh and tissue, but mostly blood clots and pink.
I thought it was over when the next wave ended, only to find another one coming, a larger blood clot the size of an uncracked egg filling the tub, where Emory had poured just the smallest bit of cold water, not even enough to cover a single toe. Over and over again, the Girls by my side humming, Adela stuffing the sponge back in my mouth when it looked like a real bad one was coming, the cramping squeezing at my pelvis, until, finally, as the sun began to rise, we all looked to the water between my legs and realized the bleeding had slowed.
Emory dressed me in some of Adela’s clothes, made a large pad out of three smaller ones while Crystal and Tori fished out the biggest blood clots and emptied them into the toilet with my vomit, flushing. Adela drained the tub and poured clean water and bleach over the stained parts of the porcelain, and then helped me into her bed, just as the kids all started to slowly blink their eyes open. Luck and Lion, half-asleep, climbed up onto the bed and into my arms, and fell back into slumber.
Emory leaned down to where I was tucked under the sheets and whispered, “It’s okay. Go to sleep.”
I was delirious with relief and fatigue and grief, and I hadn’t felt such a medley of heavy since the twins was three and a half months old and stopped sleeping for weeks on end. I’d stay up all night hushing, rocking, pleading for just an hour of silence, sure I wouldn’t last one more minute of Luck’s deep-throated scream and then another minute would come and go.
I’d sob with them, pray like I was my momma and it was the only thing keeping me from chucking my babies into the ocean. But, eventually, the sun would always creep up and, like they could sense the golden light even before it glimmered on their skin, they stopped screaming and fell asleep. And I’d be left there, curled up in blankets in the truck bed, an infant tucked under each arm, awake. All the fatigued daze boiled down to that sunrise, pink as their pulsing lips.
This is what I felt, lying in Adela’s bed, released from years of what could’ve become us. Awed I’d made it to daylight resting like a warm hand on my face, drowsy and uncertain of everything but this moment, this morning air, these purring bodies I got to call mine asleep on my chest.
Emory told me to sleep and even though I knew the hurricane was still tormenting the house, I felt like the sun had risen, breathed out a sigh and closed my eyes, a tsunami of desperation receding to reveal me, still standing on the shore, still whole and human.