ANDREA HAD NOT BEEN PREPARED FOR BIRTH. She had stockpiled gifts and practical supplies and thrifted gender-neutral baby clothes for weeks, but none of it readied her for the night Lucia tore through her, opened her in a way that would never close. Birth turned her inside out, and when she saw Lucia’s face for the first time, her wondrous touchable human face, and the faces of those around her (Meena’s eyes streaming, Lawrence pale but smiling openmouthed with astonishment, her sister Annabel’s blasphemous shout of joy), she went all out and all in. Exuberant pain, excruciating love—they were one and the same. A new ferocity roiled in her heart, shot through her entire body, pulsed through her blood. The industry that marketed motherhood in pastels and cursive was a joke. In reality it was dark red and animal and iron.
Every good and bad choice, every circumstance beyond and within her control, every little thing that had led her to this point, gazing into the dazed eyes of this tiny new creature, was worth it.
The birth certificate listed only Lucia and Andrea, the father line left blank by law. “Should I give you the father’s name?” Andrea asked. The hospital attendant recording it asked if she was married, and when she said no, replied, “Then you can’t.” All right then, Andrea thought. It’s just us two.
The early years were the hardest. Enrolling in night school as a condition of receiving welfare benefits. Desperately arranging babysitting swaps with the slightly-less-new mom who lived across the street, whom Andrea came to know now that they shared this common condition, and calling in friends, sick with gratitude for their willingness to help. The handful of humiliating times she had to call and ask her parents for money. The way time reshaped itself—a sleepless night would last forever and a workday was six hours shorter than she needed to get everything done. Blessed be WIC and CHIP and Head Start. Blessed be—no guilt—the television. Blessed be the Lego phase, which it turned out Andrea had never outgrown either, and Lucia’s learning to read. Blessed be the human safety net of friends. Blessed be well-employed Meena, who hooked her up with take-home proofreading assignments, pirated design software, and commercial illustration gigs. Blessed be Sydney, and Lucia’s other friends along the way, Skyler and Raven and Montana and Miles, and their parents. Blessed be the older lesbian parents who emerged from quarters she hadn’t known were there. Blessed be the library, the Goodwill on Killingsworth, five-for-five-dollars Annie’s mac & cheese at Fred Meyer, and a landlord too elderly to realize she could raise the rent. Blessed be the fact that you can teach at a private school without certification. Blessed be the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls.
For a long stretch in Lucia’s life, Andrea couldn’t imagine she would ever have the time or space to have sex again, much less fall in love. She was working her ass off: parenting, finishing her BA, teaching art to middle and high schoolers at a private school on the West Side. Lucia was her life partner, all-encompassing and ever-present. There was no time for art, except what she pulled together in demos for the students. The kid, the dog: her every waking moment was assigned to sheer survival, keeping them all alive and well, and no one she met was worth kicking either of them out of the bed at night.
When Lucia started preschool, Andrea thought it was time to break the longest sex drought of her adult life. But with whom? The dating pool to which her friends had free access was suddenly hard to get into. A lesbian with a toddler was saddled with a kind of adulthood from which the eternal youth of Portland shied violently away. Everyone loved Lucia, conceptually at least; she was a little mascot in her tiny Sonic Youth T-shirt and sneakers—but Andrea and kid were housebound for the night well before most people had even started getting ready to go out. The one who broke the drought was good for a couple of weeks until it became clear she was more taken with Lucia than Andrea. Then Andrea had to reassess: Lucia was off-limits to dates until Andrea was sure something would last, or at least seemed headed toward an enduring friendship. Some had little interest in hearing about Lucia; to them the kid was like a job or a pet, an element of life you left elsewhere when you wanted to enter the real world, be your true self. For most of them, there just wasn’t time. There was more than enough lesbian baggage to go around; why pick someone with extra?
Then in 2008 came Beatriz, unlike any of the others. Beatriz liked kids so much she’d come from another continent to work at the camp; she knew how to talk to them, how to teach them and joke with them and keep them moving from one place to the next. The hurdle of introduction to Lucia was cleared from day one. Beatriz and Lucia were buddies. So Andrea could bring Beatriz over to the house from the start, and Beatriz taught Lucia more chords and tricks and beginner Portuguese. Brazil was not Mexico, of course, but even the fact of Beatriz’s Latin American origins unlocked something unexpectedly deep in Andrea, a feeling of kinship and longing, a sense of rightness. Something that was new and familiar at once.
That first summer, Beatriz played shows around town and the Northwest with her band, and called and texted regularly from the road. Some nights she would sneak in after Lucia was in bed, and Andrea would be roused awake in the dark by a sheer want so strong it pushed through sleep.
Andrea couldn’t tell if Lucia knew from the start and was just playing along, or if she figured it out along the way, but a few weeks in, Lucia said to Beatriz at dinner, “You should just stay here.”
“Tonight?” Beatriz looked at Andrea, who nodded. “Okay.”
Lucia looked satisfied. She added, “Don’t go back to Brazil either.”
“I have to. But maybe not yet.”
The band went back to São Paulo at the end of July, but Beatriz postponed her ticket for another month and stayed with Andrea and Lucia, officially as a friend—until Lucia and Sydney crept into the kitchen, long past their bedtime, to sneak snacks and caught Andrea and Beatriz entwined up against the refrigerator. “Oh my gosh, they’re snogging!” Sydney said, a word they’d picked up from Harry Potter. The kids ran out the door shrieking and giggling.
Andrea tried to have a careful conversation with Lucia the next morning while Beatriz showered. Now that the thrill of discovery had subsided, Lucia sat sullen and quiet. She kicked one foot slowly against the leg of the chair she sat on. Finally she said, “Beatriz was my friend first.”
Andrea rubbed her back. “I know. And I’m so grateful for your friendship. I could never replace you in her eyes, Luz, I promise. I want a different kind of relationship with Beatriz. For one thing, I can’t play guitar at all. That’s for you guys to do. And you will always have that. You’ll always be her friend.”
Lucia didn’t look up, but she stopped kicking.
“For another thing, honestly, what I want isn’t the same as friendship. It’s a different feeling.”
“Do you love her?” Lucia asked.
“That’s a strong word,” Andrea said. Her heart thumped in her chest. “How would you feel about that?”
“Does she love you?”
Andrea said, “Jeez, I kind of hope so. What do you think?”
“Then she’d be here a lot?”
“That’s true.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t go back to Brazil.”
“Or at least she’d come back again soon.”
Lucia thought about it. She hopped off the chair.
“Where are you going?” Andrea asked.
“To wake up Syd. I’m going to pour cold water in her ear.”
“Oh no you don’t.” It was Beatriz, standing in the kitchen doorway, wet hair dripping down onto her black tank. She scooted after Lucia to scoop her up and Lucia squealed happily, which roused Sydney and foiled the plan.
What had Beatriz heard? It didn’t matter. She and Andrea said I love you by week six. “Way too early,” Beatriz said. “Definitely,” Andrea agreed. “You should never say it before six months. Maybe it’s easier for you to say it in English, because it’s like toy language for you.” Beatriz said, “Eu te amo.” “Oh fuck,” Andrea said, “now we really blew it.” And they collapsed back onto the bed.
Then came the August day Beatriz had to fly back to São Paulo. They all kept hugging and kissing at the curb, going back for second and third good-byes, and when Lucia threw her arms around them both and clung with surprising force, Andrea thought, We look like a family. They watched the airport’s wide revolving door swallow Beatriz and her guitar case and overstuffed backpack and Andrea felt like some part of her own body was being physically pulled away.
When they walked in the front door, Lucia stopped and looked around the living room. Her mouth turned down, and her eyes filled with tears. “It doesn’t feel the same,” she said.
“It doesn’t.” Andrea rubbed at the bladelike sob in her throat. “We have to get her back, don’t we?”
Andrea seldom thought of Ryan anymore, but that night, as she tried to fall asleep alone in a bed she’d grown used to sharing, she thought of the difference between Beatriz’s departure and the quiet absence when Ryan had left ten years ago. When she had realized Ryan was gone, really gone, it was like all the windows had been smashed out: she felt vandalized, yet at the same time a barometric pressure had lifted. A spell had broken. Andrea didn’t have to try so hard anymore, not in that way. The effort of attempting to feel: gone. She had breathed deep. The space was all hers. She was all hers. For only five more months, she got to belong solely to herself. Then Lucia would belong solely to her—or that’s what she thought. It was more like she belonged solely to Lucia.
Beatriz’s absence, though, was unbearable. A vacancy in the house. Andrea would do anything to get her back, and anything to keep her.
Beatriz figured out that she could stay longer on a student visa, so even though she already had a history degree from the University of São Paulo, she’d enrolled at Portland State for a second ostensible BA in environmental studies. She’d fallen in with a small crew of musicians and artists who renovated houses for a local real estate agent and were paid in cash. And so Andrea and Lucia now had Beatriz for over a year: Beatriz who could build shelves and desks and cabinets, who had rehoused all of Andrea and Lucia’s books and records in elegant light wood. Beatriz who lay back on the couch reading nonfiction books about cultish religions and true crime, and regaled them with lurid anecdotes only lightly edited for Lucia’s sake. Beatriz who made up funny songs on the spot, songs with Andrea’s name in them, earworms that Andrea found herself singing under her breath as she prepped between classes. Beatriz who made dirty jokes that Andrea loved. Beatriz who, with the exception of fried bananas, couldn’t cook for shit, comically unskilled in the kitchen, but who always took the cleanup. Beatriz who taught Lucia new fingerings on the guitar and let her use her effects pedals. Beatriz who was teaching them both Portuguese—Lucia was in a Spanish immersion program at school and caught on far more quickly. Beatriz who came to family dinner and slid right into place, refilling everyone’s drinks and talking late into the evening until Andrea was yawning and Lucia had long since conked out on a couch. Family dinner was a larger, looser affair now, every two or three months, the most reliable chance busy friends had to see each other. All Lucia’s life they’d made room for her at the table, and now they made room for Beatriz too.
Andrea wrote notes and drew tiny pictures and hid them in Beatriz’s jacket pockets and wallet. The unwritten subtext of each: Please keep us. One afternoon in July, while Beatriz was volunteering at camp, Andrea opened the drawer of the other nightstand to hide a note, and found inside all the notes and drawings she’d ever made Beatriz. A nest of slips of paper. Some contained detailed mini-letters, some—from hurried mornings—just said I love you, B in superfine Sharpie on a bent Post-it. Some were dated, many were not. Days and months were shuffled together.
Andrea thought, This is my money. On her, I would spend it all.