Adela
If I had known what was going to happen, with Simone, with the twins, with the collapse of all we were, I’m not sure I would’ve done it. Lied to Tooth, lied to Simone and the Girls. Believed I could be his family when he already had one.
But I didn’t know before the hospital, I couldn’t have. When I trained to be a junior lifeguard, they made us take first aid training and the whole thing was just one omission of information to get us not to panic, to do our job, to save a life. Sometimes you need to know what the aftermath looks like, though, because maybe if I had known, I would’ve been able to save us all the pain.
They don’t tell you in first aid training about the way blood works, about the thump and swirl of red hot beneath the skin and what happens when it runs drought dry. They don’t tell you this because nobody would ever intentionally cut off the blood supply of someone they love if they truly understood what they were doing, twisting the tourniquet so tight the limb went yellow.
If I had known I wasn’t just cutting off Simone’s blood supply to the gushing exit wound but also the blood in each of her toes, in the twitch that was our intertwined lives, then I would’ve thought about what would happen if she couldn’t walk, if the pale numb seeped beyond Simone and into Chris and me and the twins.
But no one told me that my lie was going to lead to the severance between us in the hospital, to the social worker, that all that meant me and Chris in a house with a worried five-year-old who didn’t trust the shake in my wrist as I tried spoon-feeding him applesauce and he laughed in my face.
After they took Luck away for her MRI, Chris asked me in the hospital parking lot to meet him at his place once the social worker left and help with Lion, and after all that had happened, I just wanted to be close to the one thing I still had, the person who didn’t look at me like a candle blown to smoke.
I didn’t anticipate how the rims of his eyes would bulge as he shoved his kid toward me the moment I got to his house, said he had to make a call, and then didn’t come out of the bathroom for an hour. And quickly, I realized I didn’t want a life without Simone. I wanted what came before a lie erupted, not the aftermath of dried lava turned crisp black.
A life without Simone meant my boyfriend was edging on thirty and I was going to be the stepmother to two small children who made him want to run from sight. I assumed he’d be a good dad, and he was, sort of, but it was like he was waiting for me to lead and then he’d follow.
Chris came up behind me as I stirred mac and cheese at the stove and whispered in my ear, “It’s just a day, Adela. Luck’ll be outta the hospital in the morning and we’ll get the whole thing figured out. We just gotta make it through the night. You and me, girl.”
A night is long with a child too scared to sleep. Lion had questions. I flushed at each one and avoided answering because the only response I could think of to “Why’s Momma not coming?” was Me. The social worker showed up because of Simone’s screams and threats outside Luck’s curtain in the hospital and the only reason she’d been screaming was me.
Before, I’d mined myself of guilt, believing it useless to feel remorse for things you couldn’t know before you knew. But watching Lion blink at me in a dark room as he clutched his arms close, I realized I’d ruined their lives. These children’s, Simone’s. And maybe I’d even ruined mine.
The least I could do was stretch to the ends of myself so Simone’s child wouldn’t feel so scared. Lion wouldn’t sleep in the bedroom because he said the mattress was too soft. He stood in the middle of the bedroom and refused to lay down, his face lit up in the dim of Chris’s one lamp. Chris’s roommates snored across the room.
“Fine,” I said, kneeling in front of him, my belly pulling me forward. “You want to sleep on the floor? Go for it.”
Lion’s lip puffed out and I could see he was about to cry. I sighed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Where do you want to sleep? Anywhere you want.”
He whispered, “The closet. With lots of pillows.”
Lion didn’t like the pillows with red pillowcases because they smelled funny. Lion sneezed every time he got near the leopard-print furry ones. Finally, I had to take all the pillows from the couch and Chris’s bed and pile them along the floor of the walk-in closet, throwing Chris’s clothes anywhere they’d fit, and when Lion finally laid down, he still looked so sad.
“I need a flashlight. But don’t shut the door all the way.”
I dug through every drawer in the kitchen looking for a flashlight, finding only used batteries, plastic wrappers, and cigarettes, and I was about to throw a fit when Chris entered the kitchen, asking what all the banging around was about.
“Lion needs a flashlight.”
Chris turned on his heel, leading me to the hall closet, where a flashlight sat on the top shelf.
“Well, can I have it?” I held my hand out.
He laughed. “Jump for it.”
I glared at him and, still, I jumped. I didn’t reach it the first time, so I jumped again. On the third jump, I hit it and it rolled off the shelf and fell right on my big toe and I screeched “Fuck!” and snatched the flashlight from the floor, squeezing my throbbing toe as Chris laughed some more and said he was sorry and I shoved him and told him to sleep on the floor.
I shook my foot to try to free it from the blood rushing to my toe and hopped back toward the bedroom. I handed Lion the flashlight and silently begged this to be the last thing I had to do before I could finally lay down and massage the remorse inside me.
“Sleep, okay? Just until it’s morning.”
Lion squeaked. “And then we see Momma?”
I swallowed. “Yeah, I think so. Probably.”
Lion nodded and turned around to stare at the closet ceiling. I slowly shut the closet door, leaving it cracked, and fell into Chris’s bed across the room. Chris never came tiptoeing into the room carrying antiseptic cream or a Band-Aid, never tried kissing my eyelids and cupping his hand under my stomach. He stayed in the living room, where I could see the glitter of the TV screen from under the doorway.
I laid my head on the pillow-less mattress, the duvet in the closet with Lion so all I had were sheets, and I watched the yellow flashlight switch on through the crack in the door, Lion whispering to himself the way children do, in a rasp no quieter than his talking voice.
“It’s okay. Luck just gettin’ fixed up. And then I go see her when the sun out and Momma too and Momma will bring new Goldfish, ’cause they so tasty. And then maybe she take us on an airplane, okay?” I pictured him nodding. “Okay,” he repeated.
Lion whimpered and I could hear him move around, lay his little head onto a cushion, and tell himself stories of airplanes he’d never seen until finally he fell asleep. And even when the sun rose, the flashlight was still on.
Chris wanted me to take care of Lion while he went to work this morning, but I told him I wouldn’t. That if Simone found out about it, she’d be twice as angry as she already was, and when Chris left holding Lion’s small hand to pass him off to Simone’s brother, I immediately started sobbing. This could not be what motherhood was.
I tried reassembling the fantasy of our life together. Started sewing my baby a onesie by hand the way Noni taught me and finished the seams of some socks. Dreamed the baby would somehow come out looking like Chris, and cried myself to hiccups when I became sure Simone was going to lose her kids and I’d have to live with being the reason why. I ignored Noni’s calls and changed my clothes twice, settled on wearing one of Chris’s T-shirts, even though now it fit almost like it could be my own, barely covering the belly.
And then, just when I was sure I couldn’t wait for Chris to come home anymore, I heard the door open. I heard him shake his boots off, heard him grunt. I took a deep breath and held it, counted the seconds like I did sometimes to make sure my lungs could still do what they once did. He opened the bedroom door and I let the breath go.
He was alone.
“You’re back.” I sat upright, the pillows behind me on the newly made bed. I’d hung each of his shirts up in the closet and folded his boxers in the drawers.
He smoothed his hands over his head and collapsed onto the bed, leaned up against the wall, pulled his shirt off.
“Never been happier to see you,” he said.
It still got me. I kissed him slow, forgetting the night before, attributing it to a weak moment, all of us stressed and tired.
“What happened?” I laid on his chest and he caressed my back.
“Had to go get Simone’s truck from the impound and bring it to her, but Luck’s okay. She’s not allowed to run or nothing for a while, but she outta the hospital. And looks like they not gonna take the twins.”
I paused. “They’re not? How?” I’d already planned a life without her, where I’d destroyed her family and become a mother to three at once, and I wasn’t sure how I felt, knowing it would go back to the way it was. Relieved, I guessed, but also so insignificant. So small.
“I told that social worker that there wasn’t no way I could be watching no kids all day while I work and if I had to answer another question about why there wasn’t no milk in my fridge, I was gonna explode. Told him we all lived together and that I’d childproof the house and shit and that it was just a fucking fluke.”
I stared at him. He rubbed crust from his eyes and yawned. He twisted my nipple through my shirt and I pushed him away. “Are you serious, Chris?”
He lifted his hands up like I’d accused him of something he hadn’t done. “What? You told me you didn’t wanna have ’em all day either.”
“You told the social worker you were with Simone? And that you don’t want to take care of your children? What about ours?”
I choked on the word and realized I’d started to forget this baby wasn’t Chris’s, that I was asking him to raise a child that wasn’t his, even if he didn’t know it. Still, what if he never found out, what if I gave up my everything and he still left me with this baby alone, didn’t care enough to get off the couch and make the baby a bed out of pillows if that’s what they needed.
“That’s different. You take care of it during the day and I’m gonna buy you diapers and give y’all some good loving when I get home. What else you want? You think you’re gonna get much better from all those boys at your school?”
I shrugged, chewed on my inner cheek until it felt like ground meat. “I just, I thought we were going to be a family.”
“What you think a family is? Reciprocity, Adela. I give you what you need and you give me what I need. Keep complaining and you’ll end up all shriveled up and alone like Simone.”
I sat up, removed my hand from his chest, and reached for the closest thing I could find. My hand found the flashlight beside the bed and I whipped around and chucked it at Chris as hard as I could, but, of course, he caught it between his two palms.
I stood up, pulled my sweatpants on, and marched out of the room, out of his house, out of this life he’d constructed for us without ever asking me if that’s what I wanted.
When I first met Lindsay, in those beginning weeks of ninth grade, I was as sure she was going to be my best friend as I was she was going to toss me aside someday. She’d never met anyone like me, someone she could relate to like all the friends she’d had before, fawning over boys and trading secrets about past pains—lightly slicing her wrists a few times before deciding she was more emotionally evolved, watching the despair of her parents together but not in love—but who added something different, something special. A black fist against an off-white wall almost makes you believe it is the purest white you’d ever seen.
I didn’t mind, though, because I was used to impermanence and the art of letting go, always chasing something new. It was part of what made me great. I was unattached. I was willing to soar from one end of a pool to the other and only care about those seconds it took me to glide.
Of course, what comes with having friends who you always suspect will dispose of you is having to remind yourself not to look like you care too much. Once you master the craft of pretending you have no stake in this life of yours or these people who disguise themselves with the face of loving you, you eventually start to believe you actually don’t care at all.
In some ways, I think that’s how I ended up in this mess. Pregnant. Alone. But on the day I left Chris’s crying, for the second—or maybe sixth—time, I forgot not to care.
I’d reached the point of pregnancy where running caused a strange pulsing in my bladder, like a yo-yo, elastic and bouncing and heavy, so I tried not to run often, instead slowing myself down and swiftly walking the path to the beach.
When I got there and it was endless and empty, I turned around and kept walking. Sweated so much I removed Chris’s shirt and threw it into a nearby tree so it dangled from a high-up branch, and then I walked on in my bra and sweatpants, through the mud ravine, losing my way and becoming tangled in overgrowth I was sure was rampant with snakes, until, finally, I arrived at the sound of them.
The Girls looked tender as a newly healed bone, sitting huddled together in the back of the truck, Simone in the center of them, Luck swaddled in her arms. Lion sat on Emory’s lap to her left and April and Jamilah were gone, but the rest were there. I ran when I saw them, forgetting my bladder, my weight, because I had never been more relieved to see a full red truck.
“I went to the beach looking for you guys, I didn’t know where you were. I’m so sorry, Simone, I really am, but I swear I didn’t know Chris was yours when I first met him. I’ve had the worst day, I was just with Chris and he told me that he wasn’t going to take care of the baby. I mean, he didn’t say that, but he pretty much told me it wasn’t his job and that I should be happy he wanted to stick around and I shouldn’t push him to change a diaper because I should be grateful he was even willing to buy them. Can you believe that? I just feel like I’m all alone, and…” I slowed when I looked into Emory’s face pried open and leaking disgust, Simone’s blank stare, Crystal’s sneer.
Emory spoke. “Get out of here, Adela.”
“But…I said I was sorry.” I wanted my shirt back, something to shield myself from theirs eyes on my skin, my stomach. “I accepted your apology, why won’t you accept mine?”
Simone wasn’t angry like usual. Her voice was flatlined and coarse from crying, low and lucid. “I gave you a few bruises. You stole my children’s father. And now, on the day I get my babies back, after the worst day of my life, you wanna come here whining ’cause you sad a man who’s not even your baby’s real daddy’s not gonna take care of it? ’Cause you’re not special enough he’ll change for you?” Simone shook her head. “I suggest you listen to the only person here who seems to care about you and go.”
I wanted to look at Emory and see remorse, see change, but it was not there, not in the sun spots on her neck, not in the sprouting lines leading up to her hairline. She was done with me. So I did what I should have done before and tried not to care, went home and filled the bathtub Simone had bled into so many months ago.
I undressed and slipped into the water and I thought I was going to be okay, thought I had shaken the care from my skin and just had to wait for it to lift into a film floating at the top of the water, but when I looked down at myself, I saw what I was made of.
Full of soggy shame, a belly that would not submerge beneath the water and instead stuck out like a buoy. I tried splashing warm water over the dome of skin, over and over, but a moment later the water would slide off, leaving it dry and gasping for warm relief. A sliver of me that could not retain heat, that could not be hidden or cleaned, and would remain, for as long as I could see, impenetrable and cold.