It might be hard to believe, but I liked church. Well, not church itself, but everything leading up to it. I’d been thinking about that a lot lately. Every Sunday, I went back to the patch of beach where the orca washed up. I thought at first it was ’cause I loved that orca, wanted to keep remembering her even if no one else did, but now I think I went ’cause I missed Grammy and Pawpaw and it was the only peaceful time of the week.
Reminded me of our good moments together. Pawpaw and me taking our slow walks to church. Grammy always left early to go hang around with the old ladies and help set things up, so it was just Pawpaw and me strolling through town, the sky still and neither of us talking. We held hands till I got too old, and then we held pinkies.
When I told them I was pregnant, we stopped our walks, stopped attending church at all. I never much liked our church itself. It was cold. We didn’t sing. We didn’t hum. We glanced around at each other and listened to the pastor until he made our cheeks turn pink. But now I missed it. Or at least I missed Sundays. Missed those walks, the only times I felt truly close to Pawpaw, the only times there was ever that much peace between us.
So now, when I needed a moment of open air, especially on Sundays but sometimes Wednesdays and Fridays too, I’d sneak out of the garage early, leave Kai with Jayden, and walk to the beach. Sometimes I’d hear Simone’s truck roll up, but she knew better than to walk down the hill of sand to sit with me. Simone left me alone with the smooth beach, stripped of all signs the orca’d ever been here, and let me wallow.
I’d been a mother for nine months now. I’d watched his hair fall out and come back curled, watched him learn which fingers he liked to suck best, settling on the middle and ring fingers, watched him see his first tree, love his first auntie, hate the smell of beets and me right out the shower. I’d lost more hours of sleep than I could ever hope to regain. I’d wondered why anyone ever wanted to do this at all.
Still, I thanked God I could roll on the floor with him when he first started to commando crawl, and I wished for nothing but the smell of the nape of his neck after hours apart. It was a paradox, loving him, being his mother.
Sometimes I stared at him and was angry he didn’t look much like me at all.
Sometimes I stared at him and was relieved he didn’t look much like me at all.
I’d done it for nine months and I still wasn’t sure I’d survive to the end of the year let alone the end of my lifetime. I’d heard about male lions who killed other lions’ cubs when they took over a group, just for the chance at a fresh start, and sometimes I understood that.
There were moments I wanted to throw Kai across the room. Motherhood bred the cruelest of hate and still I loved everything about the me that made him, the me that held his neck in my palm every night and stayed despite his cries. The me that wanted so much for him. I loved that person almost as much as I hated the mother who resented the life he took from me.
Adela was easy to spot on a beach empty as a desert’s freezing night. She waddled, clutching at the air like it’d catch her if she fell. I wished hope didn’t bloom in my chest when I saw her, but it did. I desired. I loved. I tore an opening in my stomach where I thought she belonged and waited for her to fill it.
And when she made it down the beach to where I sat, struggled to find a way to sit without toppling over like a poorly constructed building, I was surprised to see her face wasn’t a smattering of delusion like it normally was. She wasn’t pretending. For the first time since I knew her, Adela might just tell me the truth.
“You never loved me.” I meant it as a question till I said it and it wasn’t one.
“Of course I do. You’re my best friend,” she whispered to me. At least it sounded like a whisper beside the roaring ocean.
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I know you’re making a mistake.”
If you’ve ever loved somebody and watched them tell you what you don’t wanna hear, you know it’ll make you spiteful in a way no stranger could. How could she question my choices when she’d chosen a man who wouldn’t love her like she was a tree newly transplanted and prone to wilting?
I grabbed a fistful of sand and watched it slip from my hand back to the ground. “Go back to Tooth and stop pretending you know better. You don’t even know if you want your own kid.” I bruised her. I’d wanted to, till I did it, and then I wanted to take it back. “Sorry.”
She ignored it even though I knew it hurt. “Don’t act like you aren’t conflicted too. I know you, Emory. You applied to schools you’d never even heard of just to prove you could get in and now you did and you’re going to pass it all up to marry a guy you don’t love?”
“I love him, okay? He’s my child’s father.”
Adela rolled her eyes. “And you’re your child’s mother. Doesn’t really help anybody to watch the two people Kai belongs to pretend they love each other until eventually it all falls apart and he realizes he is the reason his mom is so unhappy she doesn’t even bother to brush her teeth anymore.”
I ran my tongue over my teeth. They were fuzzy with plaque, and I tried to remember the last time I’d brushed them and couldn’t.
“That’s ’cause I got a baby to take care of, not ’cause I’m unhappy.”
“Then tell me why you started dyeing your roots again when I met you and now they’ve gone back to brown. I like your brown hair, but you don’t. You don’t like yourself like this, Emory.”
“So what?” I hissed. “Maybe it’s not Jay or college or whatever that made me like this. Maybe it’s you.”
I was poison ivy bound to spread to anyone close enough to touch, but Adela didn’t show any signs of itching.
“I know I hurt you. I know that. I just want you to think of yourself before you do something you can’t take back. Or, if you can’t think of yourself, think of Kai.”
“I am.” My voice cracked open like a glass in a porcelain sink. “I thought of myself so much I was gonna hurt him. I let Pawpaw look at him like he was infecting our family, I let myself forget he was more than just some stray cat I was forced to feed. I’m not gonna let him hurt like I did, growing up in a fractioned family. I won’t do that to him.”
Usually, Adela waited for me to stop crying. She’d wait patiently, sometimes for an hour, but she’d never console. Never touch. Never show her cards. It was part of what made me like her: she was an impossible mystery. But today she reached forward and placed her hand on the middle of my back, smoothed in circles, felt my tremors beneath her fingertips. Her hand felt different this way than when we held hands. It was firmer, more sure of itself.
Finally, she spoke. “That’s not what makes a family good, Emory. You can’t protect him from everything. You can’t give him two parents with wedding rings on and expect that to fix it. It’s your job to make peace with your mistakes. And then it’s your job to try again. Buckle under the first time you get scared and how will you do this for the rest of your life? You’re supposed to teach me, Em. Any day now, I’m going to feel hopeless and scared and unsure and you’re supposed to show me what to do. You can’t give up on yourself or you’re just like every other mother who thinks she’s choosing her baby when she’s really choosing her own fear.”
Back when I told Grammy about Matilda the snake, she gripped my wrists tight, made me look into her ghostly blue eyes, and whispered, “Don’t you tell your pawpaw, Emory. He’d just about have a stroke, with all he’s got goin’ on. Just stay away from Ron and you’ll be fine. Boys only do that when you tempt ’em.”
I always told myself Grammy didn’t mean to shut me up and make me curl in on myself. She was a woman who thought she was done rearing children and couldn’t handle me making it any harder. But now I was thinking back, and Grammy was wrong for it. She did everything for herself and then said it was for the both of us ’cause that was easier than admitting she was in over her head.
“What if he hates me for it? In fifteen years, what if Kai decides I was just as bad as everyone thought I’d be and he leaves me and I’m all alone?”
Adela touched my cheek with her thumb. “Stop running from being alone, Emory. Sometimes alone is the best place to be.” She smiled. “Besides, if he grows up to hate you, then you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to do better. And that’s more than most people can say.”
Tears were still pooling in the canals of my face when Adela leaned in and kissed me. I’d never been kissed like that before. Like she didn’t mean it, not really. She kissed me like someone waves goodbye, halfhearted and with the same urgency as a kettle inching toward a boil. She wanted me to know she was there, wanted me to feel her, by breath, by heat, but she didn’t mean the kiss like I meant it when I kissed her in my daydreams. All of me falling into it, like a wave crashes.
She pulled away and smiled, patted her belly and told me the baby was kicking. I was embarrassed to have her see me want more but I couldn’t wipe the desire from my face.
When she got up to leave, I didn’t beg her to stay. She didn’t ask if I wanted to come with her. She climbed back up the hill like she walked down, but this time, Adela used her hands too, clawing at the sand like a baby on all fours, her stomach low and scraping the ground beneath her.
When she was gone, I tasted the kiss. Adela always smelled like chlorine, even when she hadn’t been in a pool, but beneath that, I could taste how Adela loved me. Like a new mother loves an older one, searching for something, relieved at their touch. Finding solace but never fire, because Adela did not love me the way I loved her. Like a girl loves another girl she saw across the sand, shoulders broad as a Florida sky, and found something she wanted beneath all the fatigue of need. And even though this devastated me, it did something else too. It shocked me awake.