—
My parents lived ninety minutes away up the coast, in a tile-roofed Mediterranean in the hills, not far from Rattlesnake Canyon. It was not the house that I’d been born in—that had been a far more modest two-bedroom bungalow in a neighborhood where you didn’t find hiking trails outside your back door. This particular home had materialized in high school, not long after my sister and I were cast as the stars of a middling Nickelodeon TV series. My mother had done quite well for herself, for a while, as manager of her daughters’ acting careers; better than I had done, it had to be said. Then again, any money she might have made off my career was probably better spent by her than by me, because she at least had a house to show for her percentage, while all I had for mine was an empty rental apartment and the scars on my psyche.
My mother was already standing in the garden when I pulled into the driveway. She wore a caftan printed with palm trees that billowed around her stout legs. A straw visor shaded her eyes, bright red curls neatly puffed into place. She waved both arms at me with an eagerness that bordered on aggressiveness. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, which had mostly been fine, except for all the weeping.
“Darling!” She waited for me to approach and then threw her arms around me.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, and let her hug me for longer than felt necessary, considering. I guess she was relieved that at least one of her daughters wasn’t currently running rogue. She sniffled a little into my shoulder. She had grown smaller, I noticed, more askew. And when she turned to walk with me up the garden path I realized that she was limping a little.
“Osteoarthritis,” she said, noticing me noticing. “Just like your grandmother. You’ll have it, too, someday, I’m sure. It’s how all the women in our family go.”
I’d spent so many years skating right to the edge of death and then leaping back that it was strange to imagine my demise as a slow natural decline. Our parents’ bodies mirror our eventual mortality, unless we divert the paths ourselves. God knows I’d tried.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
She lifted her chin, a plucky little display of bravery. “Of course. But I take CBD oil, and that helps. And Belva at Om Chakra gave me some aventurine and blue chalcedony, which are supposed to be good for pain and inflammation, so I carry those in my pockets all the time now.”
What I thought was What would really help you is some oxycodone, but of course I knew better than to say this out loud since it was only three years back that she caught me crushing up oxy pills and snorting them in the guest bath. The ensuing fight ruined her sixtieth birthday party completely. So, yeah, too soon to make jokes.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked.
“She’s napping,” my mother said. “And she’s not a baby, she’s a toddler. Two years old.”
I did the math—I hadn’t seen my sister in a while, but surely it hadn’t been that long. “Wait, how can Elli possibly have a two-year-old?”
“She’s adopted.” She bit her lip. “Maybe you know, Elli and Chuck had been trying for so long, and…” Her voice trailed off a bit. “Anyway, it’s been a big year. You heard that Chuck left? Just bailed out five months ago, only weeks before the adoption came through. Quite a surprise. Both Charlotte’s arrival and Chuck’s departure.” She practically spat out his name. Gone was the dulcet awe of Chuck who can do no wrong or Chuck the successful son-in-law, why don’t you find yourself someone like him, Sam, hmmmm? “Anyway, Charlotte has been a real consolation, a welcome distraction for all of us throughout that whole mess. She’s a blessing, really.”
She turned to me and smiled, hands clutched tight to her chest, having already shaken off the bad news and moved on to the good. That was my mother: conflict averse. When Elli and I were children and used to fight, my mother would just close the door to our bedroom as if shutting the door might mean our fight wasn’t happening at all. If one of us went to her to tattle, she would stick her fingers in her ears and say, I can’t hear you. She lived in terror that the tiniest crack in her world might let a river of woe come pouring through. This approach hadn’t done much good when it came to me.
I thought about the baby—toddler. I wasn’t sure what a two-year-old even looked like. “Two years old. So—she can walk and talk?”
My mother opened the front door and a blast of cool air hit me in the face. “For God’s sake, Samantha. Yes, she can walk. That child is constantly in motion, and with my hips the way they are, you understand why I just can’t keep up. She needs someone quick and young to keep an eye on her. To take her places—to the park, or the beach—and wear her out so she actually sleeps.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I couldn’t tell whether this was a hypothetical, or a jab at me. But she was smiling, at least. We stood in the foyer of the quiet house, the sounds from outside sucked up by the beige carpet and slip-covered couches. I could see a purple crayon streak on the hallway wall, only partially rubbed away. There was an animal cracker under the console. It looked like the house hadn’t been vacuumed in at least a week. My mother was clearly losing it.
She looked at me, tiny muscles tightening around her lips. “Elli…Well, I’m not going to text her to let her know that you’re here. She might not—” She hesitated. “Your sister never explained what happened. Why you haven’t spoken in so long. I wasn’t sure…” Her voice trailed off again and I knew what she was thinking, that Elli might not want me taking care of her child. I felt a rush of blood to my cheeks; considering last year’s debacle, it was possible my mother wasn’t so wrong.
“It was all just a misunderstanding,” I said. “We’re going to work it out eventually.”
“I’m sure you will.” She reached out, took my hand, and squeezed it, a nervous smile on her face. “You’ll let me know if you don’t think you’re up for this after all, right?”
“I’m doing great, Mom. It’s all behind me. Promise.” I smiled a radiantly toothy smile that I’d perfected with my acting coach at fifteen, a smile that exuded trust me. I’m going to take the best fucking care of this child, I thought. They are going to be blown away by what a good aunt I am, how much I’ve changed. It’s going to be all ice cream and candyfloss around here. I pushed past the inconvenient fact that I had never spent any time with children, never paid close attention to them at all. I made a point not to coo at the babies who came into the café strapped to their fathers’ chests in BabyBj?rns and getting latte foam dripped on their downy heads. A baby, a family—it was so far from the world that I’d built for myself (correction: the hole I’d dug for myself) that it was easier to just fling that notion even further away and to think of reproduction as a monetizable bodily function, rather than an emotional imperative. I’d seen what that desperate need had done to my sister. It wasn’t pretty.
Better to want nothing at all, and then you’ll never be disappointed.
So here’s the sum total of what I knew about kids: They spilled cocoa on the café floor and left pee on the bathroom seats and fingerprints on the pastry display case. They were cute but destructive and seemed to demand a lot of attention. But I didn’t not like them. So surely I could handle one single kid.
As I was imagining this, my mother looked back through the front door and eyed my Mini Cooper with trepidation. “Can you fit a car seat in that thing? What’s the safety rating? Charlotte’s still rear-facing, you know.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”