“Marry you?” Jayden couldn’t be serious. We weren’t even together.
It was a joke the bayou rattled at and I laughed with it. Giggled like Kai at the sound of my keys in the lock. I mean, he couldn’t be for real. We were barely a unit at all, with him always gone to work and Pawpaw not letting him inside the house. We were a heterogeneous mixture, stuck in the same place without really being one. He couldn’t possibly think I’d marry him.
“Just think about it. Me and you and Kai, we’d be together all the time and in a couple months I could maybe even get us a little place, somewhere near the water, and we could let Simone stay with us sometimes, when it rains and shit. Don’t you want that?”
The bayou shone copper and I stopped laughing. I couldn’t make sense of it, was about to cuss him out just for asking me a question so stupid, but then my phone pinged. Simone.
HELP. LUCK. HOSPITAL.
I turned my back to him and placed Kai in the stroller, started pushing it out of the marsh, knowing Jay would follow without me saying nothing at all.
“Where you going? Answer me!”
“It’s your sister,” I called over my shoulder. “She’s at the hospital, she needs me, and so you’re gonna drive me there and you’re not gonna ask me again if I’ll marry you till after I know Luck’s okay.”
Jay didn’t resist, jogged ahead of Kai and me to open the truck door, and folded the mucky stroller into the truck bed as Kai and me slid into the cab bench. Kai was the only one who made noise as Jay drove. The only one whose breath could be heard wheezing over the truck engine. The only one who was not quietly thankful that Simone had texted, that there was a way out of this question that wasn’t yes or no.
When we pulled into the hospital parking lot, I saw Simone’s truck right outside the front doors and then Tooth’s car, or at least I was pretty sure it was his, and I knew it was worse than I’d imagined.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Jay breathed as he pulled in next to Tooth’s car and we hopped out. I passed Kai to him and ran toward the entrance of the hospital, Jay following. Before I even got to ask the nurse where they were, I heard Simone’s voice.
“Are you fucking with me?”
Simone’s shout echoed down the hall, a marble sent rolling and growing with speed as I followed it toward rows of curtains containing so much sizzling pain. If I wasn’t already swollen with worry for Luck, if I wasn’t already sputtering over Jay’s question, I would’ve been able to feel the resin of doom each footstep left behind as I walked toward Simone’s howl and pretended I didn’t feel what was coming.
There they were. Outside the last curtain. Simone’s finger raised and whipping around. Tooth across from her with the same blank expression he always had, like his face muscles didn’t work. And then, in the little triangle of them, someone else.
Wearing a hoodie and shorts, tan legs and a broad back, I knew it was Adela before she turned and I saw her stomach. I could spot her anywhere, anywhere at all. No matter how she attempted to cover her face with her hood and make herself small.
When you loved somebody, they were always gonna be the first one you saw in any room, the clearest blur in any crowd, the center of any photograph.
“Adela?” At first, she pretended she didn’t see me. She looked at me and then looked away, back at Simone, as though I didn’t know her eyes. As though I didn’t dream of falling into the pit of them. “Why are all y’all here?”
If I wasn’t still unwinding myself from the web of this day, I would’ve caught on quicker. All I knew for sure was Simone was in a fitful rage and something was very wrong. I was preparing myself to fix it, revive another orca, when Adela turned to me, Simone still staring at her like she’d just stolen the shirt off her back.
Adela met my eyes and kept them finally, and hers rapidly filled with hot tears. “I—I…” Her voice trailed into nothing, and Simone stepped forward, close enough to Adela I was starting to think another fight was about to go down, this time in the center of the hospital, two inches from the curtain that shielded so many strangers’ wounds.
Simone rasped, “This high yellow hussy been fucking my babies’ daddy this whole time. Riding in my car and then getting with him, pretendin’ you not a two-faced ho, you and your stupid rich ass—”
“Whoa, whoa!” Tooth stepped between Simone and Adela and my body stirred and grew nauseous, while my mind resisted the plain truth of it and decided it couldn’t understand. What was Simone talking about, Adela and her kids’ daddy, Adela and…
Tooth held a hand up to Simone. “Back up now. What, y’all been friends or something?”
Adela burst into tears and my first instinct was still to grab her hand and lace it in mine. “I didn’t…I don’t…”
Simone started in again. “Like hell you ain’t known. I let you near my kids, my friends, my entire fucking life, while you’ve been lyin’ and messin’ around with this motherfucker?” Her eyes switched to Tooth and narrowed. “And you! I’ve been nothing but good to you, I didn’t even have to call you when Luck—”
“Ma’am?” We turned and the doctor was standing there, curtain pulled open, face stretched upward. I guess he’d just come back with Luck from somewhere down the hall and quickly more nurses were being called to Luck’s bedside, in a frenzy over her. I could see her right arm in a splint and a bandage around her head. “Whose child is this?”
“Mine,” Simone and Tooth said. I could tell everything else disappeared for Simone in that moment, at the sight of the doctor’s face scrunched like a fern’s scaffolded leaves.
“I just took a look at your daughter’s CT scan and there appears to be a fracture in her skull. The fracture itself isn’t our current concern. It looks like there is a small hematoma, a bleed, and we may need to perform an emergency craniotomy if the bleed gets any larger. We need to take her back for more imaging. Since it’s so small, we can’t be sure until we complete an MRI. One of you is welcome to come back with her until the MRI begins, but then you will need to leave the room for the test itself.”
None of us could make sense of it. You could feel that in the silent beats that followed, the group of us a family of deer paused in the moment they located the predator that had been stalking close the whole time, and I knew we were all wondering the same thing: how we could’ve been worried about something as pointless as reckless love when a child was in peril, laying in a bed a few feet away. Her brain bleeding.
“I’m going with her.” Simone snapped out of the daze first, looked to Tooth. All the anger had fizzed from her face, replaced by undiluted fear. “Stay with Lion. Make sure he don’t get too scared.”
Lion was slumped in a chair by Luck’s hospital bed, asleep through all the screaming in the way only children that small can sleep.
Simone followed the nurses from the room, pushing Luck’s bed, sneakers squeaking across the vinyl floor. Luck herself just laid there in the bed, clammy and silent for the first time since I’d met her, and then the bed disappeared down the hall and the rest of us remembered everything that’d been said and stood there, staring at anything but each other.
Tooth was the first to move, slinking past the curtain and fully into Luck’s room to take a seat beside Lion. Adela glanced down the hall, her pupils so dilated it made her hazel eyes look black as an owl’s and I wanted her to look at me so bad, but she wouldn’t. Her eyes bounced toward the nurses’ desk, the fire alarm, and then settled on Tooth. Adela’s eyes remained pinned on him, and my brain and body collided in one solid mass of understanding that gathered in the well of my throat.
Adela crying. Simone’s sting and snarl. When it clicked, I felt the moment my heart split open. She wasn’t here for Simone or for me. She was here for Tooth. And then it all made sense. Her weekends away, her pool friend, her revelation that she was in love with someone at the hurricane party. Her admission that that someone wasn’t me at the picnic table. Adela loved Tooth. Not me. Him. The minute I knew the truth, I desperately wished to unknow it.
Adela stood there staring at Tooth, sniffling in her hoodie. His hoodie. “You—you’re with him?” My voice fractured like cement bearing too much weight. Like Luck’s skull.
She glanced back at me. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I didn’t know why she was apologizing. ’Cause I loved her? ’Cause she’d let me? ’Cause clearly she’d known about Simone but continued on with the man who’d hurt her or ’cause Adela hadn’t cared enough to confess before she’d made us love her.
I didn’t believe her. She wasn’t sorry.
Pawpaw’s words jumped out my mouth. I spit at her, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s rainin’, Adela. Guilty’s not the same thing as sorry.”
Adela’s tears quickened, a race to her mouth. Her voice crackled and she repeated, “I’m sorry.”
Adela’s head sunk to her chest, and I willed her to leave, to not force me to choke on the sight of her, but instead of walking down the hall, she glided away from me and into the hospital room, where I knew she was ready to stumble into Tooth’s waiting arms. Before she did, she turned back to pull the curtain shut, and when she caught my eye, she grimaced. Like she was the wounded deer among us. The mint-green fabric fluttered closed behind her.
She was a coward. Or maybe she was just smarter than me. She’d made a choice to love somebody who could give her something, and I’d made the choice over and over again to love somebody who had nothing for me instead of the person who wanted nothing more than to give me everything.
It was just Jay and me left on the other side of the curtain, Kai still nuzzled in his arms, and when I twisted to look at my child’s father, I saw something different in him than I had these past seven months. I’d fucked up. Everybody said when I was pregnant, That boy’s gonna leave you soon as the baby’s born. But instead I left him. And yet here he was. Still here.
Jay’s eyes had remained on me this whole time and they were creased in worry, ready to trample over himself to give me whatever I wanted, even if what I wanted wasn’t something he could give me at all. He was gonna protect me. Not just me but the little one I loved. Kai’s small body so delicate in Jay’s arms.
Maybe I didn’t understand what I was signing up for when I stopped taking the pill, when I gave birth and tried to pretend I could remain unchanged. But now I knew there was no going back, even if I wanted to. I was this child’s mother and even though he’d never be as safe as the moment before he exited my body, I’d swim thousands of miles just for a chance to see his face clear and not swollen from sobs, his body smooth except for patches of dry scales I’d rub in lotion before bedtime.
One day he’d grow up and leave me. One day I’d send Kai to school or work or off in a car he was driving, and it would hurt like a snake shedding its own skin, knowing I couldn’t shield him with the weapons I retrieved from the sharpest parts of my childhood. But, for now, that was my only job. My only dream. My only hope.
I’d rip myself open not to see my child hurt. For the first time, I thought I might have it in me to love him selflessly. To give him a home where love was the wood and the carpets, the roof and the drain.
Now I knew what it looked like to see a child bandaged up and broken. To see a love dropped and shattered on the floor like all fragile things. My job wasn’t to go to college or fall in love or swim in the ocean. It couldn’t be. It was to coddle my child’s soft skull. To keep the orca close so she would never wash up on the shore.
“Jay,” I whispered.
Jayden looked at me, his eyebrows raised, his eyes milky with concern for his sister, his niece, me.
I leaned in closer to him so I was pressed into his chest and I knew even if he didn’t understand how to love me, he understood how to love the person I created, how to keep him safe and, for once, this felt like enough. After watching the terror in Simone’s eyes. After watching Adela walk away. This was all I could hope for.
“I’ll do it,” I whispered. “I’ll marry you.”
I could tell from the way he looked at me that he was shocked first, and then skeptical. I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck and pulled him close, kissed him like we were in the abandoned post office, and when I pulled away, I was sure that among all the things this day left broken, my little family would not be one of them.