Adela
The most important thing to remember when you’re in the pool is that you are in control. The moment you forget you wield the water you weave through is the moment your neck begins to tip too far, your shoulders pulling away from the rest of you and pausing you at the end of each stroke, slowing you so even as you cup your hands and attempt to push the water back to propel the length of you forward, there is no way to fully make up for what you have lost. The moment you begin to worry you are not tall enough, your kick is weak, the current of the water is fighting you, it’s already over.
I think that’s how everything went wrong. I started to panic. At the bayou, Emory ruminated and ranted about regrets and miracles but never seemed to really say what she meant and then she rose abruptly and left me there, scratching at her fears lingering on me like dead skin cells, microscopic and prone to itch. She was already gone when I realized I forgot to ask for my sweatshirt back.
Bare and itching out by the bayou, I started to freak out too. Everything materialized and became real so fast, I didn’t have time to think it all through with Emory’s words sitting on my skin, so when I walked home, one arm folded across my torso, feeling all big, I should’ve expected that I would run into Chris. I’d lost sight of the end of the pool, become distracted by the wrinkle of my fingertips, and now it was all coming crashing down.
The more time I spent with Chris, the less I thought about how old he was or how old I was or how crusty his house was or how many roommates he had or that there was some other girl out there who his kids called mom. Most of the time, I was just worried about losing Chris, a trivial fear among everything else, but love was known to make you examine each speck of sand when there was a whole beach spread out and beckoning in front of you.
About a week ago, I popped. I’d spent the first twenty weeks of my pregnancy looking normal, maybe a little bloated, and then in one week I suddenly looked unmistakably pregnant. I’d been avoiding Chris since then. This made him mad, and I couldn’t blame him for wanting the thing I’d promised, my body damp and open beneath his.
I’d been preparing to tell him I was pregnant next week, I really was, but then, about two blocks from Noni’s house, I turned the corner by the school and there he was, shirt off, surfboard under his arm, and every opportunity for the truth to be mine to tell vanished.
I hugged my body tighter, pausing and facing him head-on so he couldn’t see my profile, but I already knew he’d registered it. Chris’s pupils eclipsed the brown in his eyes and his lip curled in a snarl that showed off his shark tooth and I stepped back, just one small step because he stared at me like I was the rodents he’d chase from his house when they crawled out the vents. But that step made it worse and Chris slammed his board down and charged forward, ripping both my wrists away from my body so I was standing there, uncovered.
I shook my head, begged him not to see. He’d touched me so many times before with the kind of gentleness that let me close my eyes and sink in, but this time was so different, and I could feel the ridges of his fingerprints pressing into my wrists and I was afraid.
“What is this?” he growled. “You having my baby and you ain’t even told me?”
I knew this would’ve been the moment to confess, I knew any decent person would have, but I didn’t want to see what would happen, how his grip could deepen, if he knew everything. He wouldn’t understand that just because there was little truth in our beginnings didn’t mean my love for him wasn’t honest.
Besides, he was the one who assumed it was his. He chose not to see it, which might have meant he didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want to tell him. So when I should’ve said It’s not yours, instead I shrugged and watched his lip uncurl and his fingers loosen their grip.
“I don’t like lying. You know that.” I did. But how could I tell him it was all I knew?
He released my wrists and massaged his beard. He’d shaved it and then let it grow out again and it was rough now, itchy when he kissed me. “Aight, then. We’re having a baby, I guess. God, Simone’s gonna kill me.”
“Simone?” I whispered. My throat clogged like I was brimming with water and it would spill from me if I opened my mouth again. I already knew what he was going to say, but still I begged him with the blink of my eyes not to.
“My kids’ mama.”
Simone. His kids’ mother. His kids. The twins. I wasn’t sure how I’d missed it, except he’d had his kids at twenty-two and I assumed the woman would be older, but now I questioned how I hadn’t put it all together before. Luck’s stuffed koala tucked between his mattress and the wall, Simone’s scent—piercing and firm as a forest floor—lingering in his car, all these things I thought were just coincidence come clear. And I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell him, or her, or anyone, because how could I destroy the only things I had here?
“How ’bout you come surf with me?” Chris picked up his board and nodded back toward the beach.
I returned to the clouds and his face and pulled a taut smile from my rigid skin, shook my head.
He stepped toward me again and leaned down, reached his hands around me and squeezed my ass, nipped at my neck with his teeth. I didn’t have words but I knew I was going to cry and so I shook my head again and stepped away from him, throwing over my shoulder the only word I could get out, “Bye,” and then I started to run.
I sprinted through the gravel roads of Padua until they turned to dust, under the thick gate of trees, and burst through the front door of Noni’s house, tears flooding my eyes and settling in the creases of my neck. There Noni was, through the blur, sitting on the plastic-covered couch.
She stood and I was ready for her to assault me with questions like Dad, for me to shake my head and run downstairs to the basement, where I could sprawl out and sob without having to speak, but instead, Noni opened her arms wide and waited for me to step into them. And when I did, she sat us both down on the couch, crackling under our weight, and she let me lay in her lap, wiping away each tear just for another to follow.
“When I was pregnant with your daddy, I was real old to have a baby. Back then, in these parts, old was twenty-five and I was twenty-eight when I had him, my first and only child. I married your grandfather thinking I was gonna have a whole clan of babies but then it took us six years of trying before we got lucky with your daddy.
“I was happy, I mean I was gettin’ ready to give up on having children, but let me tell you, that pregnancy was just awful, Delly, just awful. I felt like a fish flounderin’ on the concrete, everybody just watchin’ and laughin’, talkin’ about how I wasn’t suited to motherhood, couldn’t get pregnant to save my life, and then, when I did, I swelled up and couldn’t stop vomiting. Had preeclampsia too and so I was on bed rest my whole third trimester before they induced me, which sure didn’t help us pay the bills, and all I could do was stay home and sleep, ’cept I couldn’t get some shut-eye for the life of me. Worst time of my life was those nine months.
“I won’t lie to you, Adela, I hated your granddaddy by the time your father was born. He’d spent my whole pregnancy complaining ’bout how I wasn’t helping out none, even though you best believe I was still cookin’ him biscuits for breakfast and sendin’ him off to work with a sandwich I made with my bloated hands.
“I thought it’d get better after the baby was born, but it didn’t. At least not with your granddaddy. He complained I didn’t want to get down and dirty with him. He complained the baby cried too much. He complained I couldn’t work my usual hours and then, when I left your daddy with my mama to go to work, he complained I didn’t care enough about my baby.”
I looked up at Noni, face all scrunched up and head shaking, her fingers still stroking my forehead. “I thought Grandpa was nice. Dad always said he was a good guy.”
Noni hooted. “Ha! Your daddy barely spent five minutes with the man. He worked all through your daddy’s childhood, said good mornin’ to him at breakfast and good night to him at dinner, and then, when your daddy was sixteen, he dropped dead from some kidney stones ’cause he wouldn’t listen when I told him to drink some water and then he didn’t listen again when I told him to go to the doctor. I’m not trying to ruin your idea of your granddaddy for you, Delly, I’m just telling you all this ’cause you gotta understand how men gonna disappoint you. All of ’em. Every time. But you know who’s not gonna disappoint you? Your mama. Or, in your case, Adela, your noni.”
I shrugged. “I think I found a man who won’t disappoint me.” After all, Chris wanted to be my baby’s father so badly he didn’t even stop to think the baby might not be his. If that wasn’t love, I didn’t know what was.
“Is that right?” Noni continued to stroke my forehead, trying to push the frizz back down. “Then why’s my grandbaby coming home cryin’, hmm?”
“It’s not him.”
Her eyebrows crept up her face. “So you ain’t just seen him?”
“I mean, I did. But I’m not crying because he disappointed me, I’m crying because…because it’s too much. It’s all too much and if I lose him, I have nothing, Noni. My parents won’t even talk to me, my best friend at home isn’t my best friend anymore, and my baby’s dad is a guy who didn’t even like me enough to text me back.”
Noni smiled and hummed, “So it’s your baby now, hmm?”
I’d never said it before. I’m not even sure I’d ever really thought of the baby as belonging to anybody. I’m not even sure I’d ever thought of the baby as a baby at all, not until then, because, until Emory called me to croon her worries to and then took my sweatshirt and I ran into Chris and he said we were having a baby, I’d never thought that the child would do anything but take away from my life, rip everything I had from me and leave me nothing.
But now I felt a part of me wonder if all I wanted could come at the hands of this child, that I wouldn’t ever be lonely again, that Chris wouldn’t leave and I wouldn’t lose another best friend and I could have something that was really, truly mine. As long as I didn’t tell Simone about Chris and I didn’t tell Chris about Simone or the baby’s real dad or anything. I could keep the two of them separate, make sure I was never around them at the same time. I could do it. I would have to.
I felt the tears coming again. “Yeah.” I smiled. “I think she’s mine.”
And then I settled back into Noni’s arms and cried some more because Noni was prepared to hold me through it all, because it was too much but, for the first time, I was sure all this too much was mine.