I wake up with what I think is a hangover, until I remember that I didn’t actually drink that much last night. Then the night—all of it—comes rushing back to me. I stare at the stucco ceiling and remember I’m at Izzy’s. Again.
It’s early and the apartment is quiet, but I creep into the kitchen and make myself a coffee and then crawl back into bed with the book I found on the nightstand in the guest room. My phone buzzes, alerting me to post today’s photo, but when I look at the picture—one of me on the beach last year, with a caption about dreaming of a tropical getaway—I think about what Will said. So what if this isn’t a picture of something I’m actually doing at this very minute—my pictures aren’t fake. I hit Post, and then shut off my phone.
In the afternoon, I join Izzy on the balcony, where she’s attacking weeds that are growing between the cracks of paving stones with a knife. “I bet Roddy’ll let you stay another night if I tell him what a big help you’ve been around here.” She grins. “There’s another set of gloves and a knife in the bucket over there.”
I grab the floral gloves and a knife. “I’m going to go visit Dad for a bit,” I tell her.
“I was only joking,” she says but then straightens to look at me. “What happened?”
I kneel on the hard concrete and run the knife through the crack to loosen a prickly weed. “I should’ve listened to you. You were right. It would have never worked out. The kids-no-kids thing is a deal breaker. I don’t know why I ever thought I could get around it.”
“For the record, I think I came around on that too. You two seemed great together. But let me ask you: the kid thing. Do you really think you can’t come around on it?”
Izzy, of all people, has never said anything like this to me. And yet, I don’t mind that she is asking now. I glance over at her, then shrug. “Look at us. We’re Kiddings. We don’t have kids. Obviously there’s something in us that has made us not want them. Probably because we could never be as good a mom as Mom was. I mean, she was perfect.”
Izzy looks at me, her eyes wide, then bursts out laughing. “Perfect?! Mom?!”
When I don’t say anything, her voice softens. “Do you really believe that? I mean, Kit, no one is perfect. Don’t you remember how she would always overcook pork chops? And she could never fix any of our clothes if a button fell off or the fabric got a rip. And she’d yell at us if we didn’t make our beds…she wasn’t perfect, whatever constitutes perfection.”
I shake my head. “No, I don’t…I don’t remember that. I barely remember anything.”
Izzy stares at me for a moment. “Of course you don’t. You were too young.”
“I keep trying to bring up those memories—to think about what Mom would’ve done if I’d had a bake sale or a school project. I’m constantly searching my brain for memories, so I can know how to be with Addie. Like, what was Mom like with me? But I always come up blank. There’s nothing there. Or, almost nothing of the mundane everyday stuff. And then she just goes and fucking dies.”
Izzy takes off her gloves and wipes her forehead. “What are you talking about?”
I put my head between my knees so I can breathe. “Nothing. Forget it.”
“Kit,” she says, “Mom loved us so much. I always forget how young you were. How different it must have been for you. Yes, she made our Halloween costumes, she did our hair every morning for school. I remember you used to hate getting your hair done. You’d run around the house and Mom would have to catch you. She’d kind of pin you between her knees and start singing. And you loved her singing so it always worked. But she got cancer, Kit. She was so tired. And everything was hard. She couldn’t do anything anymore. If she wasn’t throwing up, she was lying down. I remember the last time she did my hair, but I didn’t know it was the last time. But I wish I did. She put my hair in French braids, but I’d wanted Dutch ones. So I took them out. Right in front of her. I was going to tell her to redo it, but I saw the look on her face, how tired she was. And I knew. I fucking knew.” Izzy’s eyes well up with tears and I have to look away. “She was such a good mom,” she says. “She really was. But she wasn’t perfect. No one is.”
“So then why didn’t you want to be a mom?”
Izzy stabs at a large weed. “I did. I always wanted kids.” At this, I sit down on a patio chair. The weeds can wait.
“Really?”
Izzy nods.“I always pictured myself as a mom. Not with a million kids, but definitely two.”
“Then why did you and Roddy always say you never wanted them?”
“We didn’t always say that. We tried. Right after we got married. And I couldn’t. We didn’t want to go through IVF or adoption. We just felt that it would be too much. The waiting, the hoping, the disappointment. You always hear about marriages ending over the turmoil that can cause. So we made a decision. We wouldn’t have kids. We told everyone we didn’t want them, so that people would stop asking, stop offering advice on what they thought we should do. It was between me and Roddy. That’s how we wanted it.”
I sit, stunned, as waves of emotions hit me. First, simple shock that this is my sister’s truth. Then hurt that I never knew that she wanted children. Then embarrassment that I had no idea she had gone through any of that in private, and that I wasn’t there to support her. Then betrayal that she never confided in me that this was a decision they had made.
“You could’ve talked to me.”
“Yeah, I could’ve. But then we would have spent months, maybe years talking about it, or not talking about it. And it would always be there. As it was, you, Dad and Roddy’s family accepted our decision. And life moved on. Our lives became about everything else, not about trying or not trying or kids, kids, kids, kids, kids.”
But what if I’d known that my sister wanted kids? What if I’d known they had tried to have them? Or what if she had had children? If she had become a mom, would I have wanted to be one too? Would seeing her with children—with my nieces or nephews—have convinced me that I could do it too? Would it have ignited an instinct that I was sure I didn’t have? Instead of me just deciding to shun the whole damn thing?