Nadia’s breath caught. “She is?”
“She’s carrying my first grandbaby and she won’t even talk to me.” Mrs. Sheppard straightened her shoulders. “Luke won’t tell me what happened, but I know you had something to do with it. I tried to tell her. I tried to warn her about you—girls don’t listen to their mothers, they never do.”
That Sunday morning, the pastor dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief as he delivered his invitation, calling all who wanted to welcome Jesus into their hearts to step forward, and she watched as people knelt at the altar, their palms lifted to the skies. Their shiny faces, heads tilted back, hands raised as they swayed and sang. During prayer, Nadia would always peek at the others who bowed their heads and closed their eyes, their hands floating toward the rafters, while she stood motionless, her arms pressed against her sides. She felt it then and she felt it every time during praise sessions, when she glanced around the room of believers—the starkness of her own loneliness.
As the choir sang “I Surrender All,” she hunched over the pew, unable to stop her tears. Her father shifted beside her, and then she felt his hand on her back. His other hand reached for hers, his rough palm against her smooth skin.
“Do you want me to pray with you?” he whispered.
He lived in prayers and sermons, in scriptures she didn’t understand, and even though it had always made her feel so far from him, she nodded. She closed her eyes and bowed her head.
—
THE MORNING SHE THOUGHT about returning home, Aubrey lay in bed, fumbling with the lid on her prenatal vitamins. She should be up by now—she’d set her alarm for a half hour ago—but pregnancy made her sleepier than she’d ever imagined. When she first moved back to her sister’s house, she’d slept endlessly, so many long, unaccounted hours that Monique thought she was depressed. She’d laughed at the suggestion—couldn’t she just be sad? Couldn’t she be devastated without there being some physical, chemical explanation?—but when she’d seen Dr. Toby, he asked if she might be pregnant. She did the backward math in her head and flushed, remembering that sloppy night on the living room couch. The doctor had been right, after all. She’d just needed a glass, or four, of wine.
“I thought you should know,” she’d told Luke.
The phone line had gone silent, and she’d checked her screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. When Luke finally spoke, he sounded choked-up, and in spite of everything, her eyes had watered too.
“Can I see you?” he’d said.
“Not now.”
“I won’t come over. I don’t have to come over but what about the doctor. Can I come to the doctor’s?”
“I’m not ready,” she’d said.
He hadn’t asked when she would be. He had abandoned his early, insistent attempts to convince her to return home. Now he circled from a distance; she felt him swooping around her, waiting. She hadn’t invited him to any of her appointments but she’d informed him of important updates, like when she learned that the baby was a girl. “A girl, wow,” Luke kept saying, and she thought about Russell asking if Luke wanted a boy. But each time he repeated “A girl, wow,” she felt his voice lifting into awe. A gender made a baby seem real, no longer a wish. She imagined Luke lifting a little girl above his head, a girl with her mother’s tight curls or her father’s wispy ones, all gathered in a puff. A girl who would not travel from home to home, who would not fear men clicking down hallways, who would not fear anything, stretching her arms as Luke lifted her high, always sure that she would land safely against her father’s chest.
“Knock knock.” Monique leaned against the doorframe, yawning. She was holding a glass of water.
“I was about to get it myself,” Aubrey said.
“I know. I was up.”
“You don’t have to check on me.”
“No one’s checking on you. I was up.”
The only thing more annoying than her sister checking on her was how she always pretended that she wasn’t. Monique eased over the scattered sneakers on the carpet, the boxes Aubrey still hadn’t unpacked although she’d moved back in months ago, and set the water on the nightstand. Then she leaned toward Aubrey’s belly and said, “Good morning, baby girl.” She always told Aubrey that she should talk to the baby more. At twenty weeks, a baby could hear. At twenty weeks, a baby could recognize her mother’s voice. But Aubrey talked to her baby the same way she talked to God, never aloud, only inside herself. She swallowed her vitamins and hugged her belly. There. I hate swallowing those and I did it for you. Anything for you.
“Where’s Kasey?” she asked.
“Sleeping,” Monique said. Then she smiled. “Hey, why don’t we get some exercise? Let’s go for a run.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Why not?”
“You run too fast.”
“I’ll jog, then. Come on—let’s just get out of the house. It’ll be good for you.”
Monique stooped, picking up the pair of sneakers off the floor. She couldn’t resist it, fixing things.
“I think I’m going by the house today,” Aubrey said. “Just to pick up a few things after work.”
Monique paused, kneeling in front of the closet. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she said.
“It’s my house. You said that.”
“But you still refuse to kick him out.”
“Where’s he supposed to go?”
“I don’t know. He should’ve fucking thought about that before.”
“It’s not a big deal, Mo,” she said. “He works late today.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be in and out.”
That night, she unlocked her front door and pushed it open slowly, like entering a stranger’s home. She did not hang her keys on the hook she’d made Luke nail to the wall because he always forgot where he put his. She did not slide her jacket on a hanger in the closet or even take off her shoes. She paused at the side table where they set the mail—a stack of letters from Nadia. She did not open them, because she knew what they would say, but she flipped them over to ensure the seal was intact. Luke hadn’t opened them either. She thought, as she often did, of the two of them whispering about her in bed. Stop, she told herself. A cord stretched from her to her baby girl, but she wondered if, along with food and nutrients, she was sending other things to her child. If a baby could feed off her sadness. Maybe that cord never broke. Maybe she was still feeding off her mother.
She flipped on the light in the guest room that she and Luke had imagined as a nursery. Before their years of infertility, back when they were newly married and hopeful, pointing at blank spaces and conjuring a crib, a planet mobile, walls painted a color soft and dreamlike. Her sister had brought her paint swatches to study, but she’d stared at lemon yellows and waxy greens, nothing quite right as she and Luke had imagined. She heard the lock click in the doorway and closed her eyes. She’d lied to her sister earlier—she knew Luke came home early on Thursdays but she was too ashamed to admit she missed him. She was not supposed to be the type of woman who forgave so readily—but she didn’t feel like a woman at all anymore. She carried a girl inside her, a girl both she and Luke, and she had become three people in one, an odd trinity.
“Wow,” Luke said, when she turned around.
He had not seen her since she’d called to tell him she was pregnant. She felt his eyes slide over her body, her swelling stomach, the ugly maternity sweatpants, and he seemed to marvel at the sight. Maybe she wasn’t as beautiful as Nadia, as brave, as smart—but she was the mother of his child. She and Nadia lived on a forever tilting floor between love and envy, and she finally felt that floor tilt until she could stand. She was birthing the kept child. She had something Nadia never would, and for the first time, she felt triumphant over Nadia Turner.
“Do you still see her?” she said.
“No,” he said. “Never. Aubrey, I just—”