The Mothers Read online

  She also knew that Fat Charlie’s was dead between lunch and happy hour, so after her pregnancy test returned positive, she rode the bus over to tell Luke.

  —

  “FUCK” was the first thing he said.

  Then, “Are you sure?”

  Then, “But are you sure sure?”

  Then, “Fuck.”

  In the empty Fat Charlie’s, Nadia drowned her fries in a pool of ketchup until they were limp and soggy. Of course she was sure. She wouldn’t have worried him if she weren’t already sure. For days, she’d willed herself to bleed, begging for a drop, a trickle even, but instead, she only saw the perfect whiteness of her panties. So that morning, she rode the bus to the free pregnancy center outside of town, a squat gray building in the middle of a strip mall. In the lobby, a row of fake plants nearly blocked the receptionist, who pointed Nadia to the waiting area. She joined a handful of black girls who barely glanced up at her as she sat between a chubby girl popping purple gum and a girl in overall shorts who played Tetris on her phone. A fat white counselor named Dolores led Nadia to the back, where they squeezed inside a cubicle so cramped, their knees touched.

  “Now, do you have a reason to think you might be pregnant?” Dolores asked.

  She wore a lumpy gray sweater covered in cotton sheep and spoke like a kindergarten teacher, smiling, her sentences ending in a gentle lilt. She must’ve thought Nadia was an idiot—another black girl too dumb to insist on a condom. But they had used condoms, at least most times, and Nadia felt stupid for how comfortable she had felt with their mostly safe sex. She was supposed to be the smart one. She was supposed to understand that it only took one mistake and her future could be ripped away from her. She had known pregnant girls. She had seen them waddling around school in tight tank tops and sweatshirts that hugged their bellies. She never saw the boys who had gotten them that way—their names were enshrouded in mystery, as wispy as rumor itself—but she could never unsee the girls, big and blooming in front of her. Of all people, she should have known better. She was her mother’s mistake.

  Across the booth, Luke hunched over the table, flexing his fingers like he used to when he was on the sidelines at a game. Her freshman year, she’d spent more time watching Luke than watching the team on the field. What would those hands feel like touching her?

  “I thought you were hungry,” he said.

  She tossed another fry onto the pile. She hadn’t eaten anything all day—her mouth felt salty, the way it did before she puked. She slipped out of her flip-flops, resting her bare feet against his thigh.

  “I feel like shit,” she said.

  “Want something different?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He pushed away from the table. “Let me get you something else—”

  “I can’t keep it,” she said.

  Luke stopped, halfway out his seat.

  “What?” he said.

  “I can’t keep a baby,” she said. “I can’t be someone’s fucking mother, I’m going to college and my dad is gonna—”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say out loud what she wanted—the word abortion felt ugly and mechanical—but Luke understood, didn’t he? He’d been the first person she told when she received her acceptance e-mail from the University of Michigan—he’d swept her into a hug before she even finished her sentence, nearly crushing her in his arms. He had to understand that she couldn’t pass this up, her one chance to leave home, to leave her silent father whose smile hadn’t even reached his eyes when she showed him the e-mail, but who she knew would be happier with her gone, without her there to remind him of what he’d lost. She couldn’t let this baby nail her life in place when she’d just been given a chance to escape.

  If Luke understood, he didn’t say so. He didn’t say anything at first, sinking back into the booth, his body suddenly slow and heavy. In that moment, he looked even older to her, his stubbled face tired and haggard. He reached for her bare feet and cradled them in his lap.

  “Okay,” he said, then softer, “okay. Tell me what to do.”

  He didn’t try to change her mind. She appreciated that, although part of her had hoped he might do something old-fashioned and romantic, like offer to marry her. She never would’ve agreed but it would’ve been nice if he’d tried. Instead, he asked how much money she needed. She felt stupid—she hadn’t even thought of something as practical as paying for the surgery—but he promised he’d come up with the cash. When he handed her the envelope the next day, she asked him not to wait with her at the clinic. He rubbed the back of her neck.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Just pick me up after.”

  She’d feel worse if she had an audience. Vulnerable. Luke had seen her naked—he had slipped inside her own body—but somehow, his seeing her afraid was an intimacy she could not bear.

  —

  THE MORNING OF HER APPOINTMENT, Nadia rode the bus to the abortion clinic downtown. She had driven past it dozens of times—an unremarkable tan building, slunk in the shadows of a Bank of America—but she had never imagined what it might look like inside. As the bus wound its way toward the beach, she stared out the window, envisioning sterile white walls, sharp tools on trays, fat receptionists in baggy sweaters herding crying girls into waiting rooms. Instead, the lobby was open and bright, the walls painted a creamy color that had some fancy name like taupe or ochre, and on the oak tables, beside stacks of magazines, there were blue vases filled with seashells. In a chair farthest from the door, Nadia pretended to read a National Geographic. Next to her, a redhead mumbled as she struggled with a crossword puzzle; her boyfriend slumped beside her, staring at his cell phone. He was the only man in the room, so maybe the redhead felt superior—more loved—since her boyfriend had joined her, even though he didn’t seem like a good boyfriend, even though he wasn’t even talking to her or holding her hand, like Luke would have done. Across the room, a black girl sniffled into her jean jacket sleeve. Her mother, a heavy woman with a purple rose tattooed on her arm, sat beside her, arms folded across her chest. She looked angry or maybe just worried. The girl looked fourteen, and the louder she sniffled, the harder everyone tried not to look at her.

  Nadia thought about texting Luke. I’m here. I’m okay. But he’d just started his shift and he was probably worried enough as it was. She flipped through the magazine slowly, her eyes gliding off the pages to the blonde receptionist smiling into her headset, the traffic outside, the blue vase of seashells beside her. Her mother had hated the actual beach—messy sand and cigarette butts everywhere—but she loved shells, so whenever they went, she always spent the afternoon padding along the shore, bending to peel shells out of the damp sand.

  “They calm me,” she’d said once. She’d clutched Nadia on her lap and turned a shell carefully, flashing its shiny insides. In her hand, the shell had glimmered lavender and green.

  “Turner?”

  In the doorway, a black nurse with graying dreadlocks read her name off a metal clipboard. As Nadia gathered her purse, she felt the nurse give her a once-over, eyes drifting past her red blouse, skinny jeans, black pumps.

  “Should’ve worn something more comfortable,” the nurse said.

  “I am comfortable,” Nadia said. She felt thirteen again, standing in the vice-principal’s office as he lectured her on the dress code.

  “Sweatpants,” the nurse said. “Someone should’ve told you that when you called.”

  “They did.”

  The nurse shook her head, starting back down the hall. She seemed weary, unlike the chipper white nurses squeaking down the hallways in pink scrubs and rubber shoes. Like she’d seen so much that nothing surprised her anymore, not even a girl with a sassy mouth wearing a silly outfit, a girl so alone, she couldn’t find one person to sit with her in the waiting room. No, there was nothing special about a girl like this—not
her good grades, not her prettiness. She was just another black girl who’d found herself in trouble and was finding her way out of it.

  In the sonogram room, a technician asked Nadia if she wanted to see the screen. Optional, he said, but it gave some women closure. She told him no. She’d heard once about a sixteen-year-old girl from her high school who’d given birth and left her baby on the beach. The girl was arrested when she doubled back to tell a cop she’d seen a baby and he discovered that she was the mother. How could he tell, Nadia had always wondered. Maybe, in the floodlights of his patrol car, he’d spotted blood streaking the insides of her thighs or smelled fresh milk spotting her nipples. Or maybe it was something else entirely. The ginger way she’d handed the baby over, the carefulness in her eyes when he brushed sand off its downy hair. Maybe he saw, even as he backed away, the maternal love that stretched like a golden thread from her to the abandoned baby. Something had given the girl away, but Nadia wouldn’t make the same mistake. Double back. She wouldn’t hesitate and allow herself to love the baby or even know him.

  “Just do it already,” she said.

  “What about multiples?” the technician asked, rolling toward her on his stool. “You know, twins, triplets . . .”

  “Why would I want to know that?”

  He shrugged. “Some women do.”

  She already knew too much about the baby, like the fact that it was a boy. It was too early to actually tell, but she felt his foreignness in her body, something that was her and wasn’t her. A male presence. A boy child who would have Luke’s thick curls and squinty-eyed smile. No, she couldn’t think about that either. She couldn’t allow herself to love the baby because of Luke. So when the technician swirled the sensor in the blue goo on her stomach, she turned her head away.

  After a few moments, the technician stopped, pausing the sensor over her belly button.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “What?” she said. “What happened?”

  Maybe she wasn’t actually pregnant. That could happen, couldn’t it? Maybe the test had been wrong or maybe the baby had sensed he wasn’t wanted. Maybe he had given up on his own. She couldn’t help it—she turned toward the monitor. The screen filled with a wedge of grainy white light, and in the center, a black oval punctuated by a single white splotch.

  “Your womb’s a perfect sphere,” the technician said.

  “So? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That you’re a superhero, maybe.”

  He chuckled, swirling the sensor around the gel. She didn’t know what she expected to see in the sonogram—the sloping of a forehead, maybe, the outline of a belly. Not this, white and bean-shaped and small enough to cover with her thumb. How could this tiny light be a life? How could something this small bring hers to an end?

  When she returned to the waiting room, the girl in the jean jacket was sobbing. No one looked at her, not even the heavy woman, who was now sitting one seat over. Nadia had been wrong—this woman couldn’t be the girl’s mother. A mother would move toward a crying child, not away. Her mother would’ve held her and absorbed her tears into her own body. She would’ve rocked her and not let go until the nurse called her name again. But this woman reached over and pinched the crying girl’s thigh.

  “Cut all that out,” she said. “You wanted to be grown? Well, now you grown.”

  —

  THE PROCEDURE only takes ten minutes, the dreadlocked nurse told her. Less than an episode of television.

  In the chilly operating room, Nadia stared at the monitor that hung in front of her flashing pictures from beaches around the world. Overhead, speakers played a meditation CD—classical guitar over crashing waves—and she knew she was supposed to pretend she was lying on a tropical island, pressed against grains of white sand. But when the nurse fit the anesthesia mask on her face and told her to count to a hundred, she could only think about the girl abandoning her baby in the sand. Maybe the beach was a more natural place to leave a baby you couldn’t care for. Nestle him in the sand and hope someone found him—an old couple on a midnight stroll, a patrol cop sweeping his flashlight over beer cases. But if they didn’t, if no one stumbled upon him, he’d return to his first home, an ocean like the one inside of her. Water would break onto the shore, sweep him up in its arms, and rock him back to sleep.

  —

  WHEN IT WAS OVER, Luke never came for her.

  An hour after she’d called him, she was the only girl still waiting in the recovery room, curled in an overstuffed pink recliner, clutching a heat pad against her cramping stomach. For an hour, she’d stared into the dimness of the room, unable to make out the faces of the others but imagining they looked as blank as hers. Maybe the girl in the yellow dress had cried into the arms of her recliner. Or maybe the redhead had just continued her crossword puzzle. Maybe she’d been through this before or she already had children and couldn’t take another. Was it easier if you already had a child, like politely declining seconds because you were already full?

  Now the others were gone and she had pulled out her phone to call Luke a third time when the dreadlocked nurse dragged over a metal chair. She was carrying a paper plate of crackers and an apple juice box.

  “Cramps’ll be bad for a while,” she said. “Just put some heat on ’em, they’ll go away. You got a heat pad at home?”

  “No.”

  “Just heat you up a towel. Works just as fine.”

  Nadia had hoped she might get a different nurse. She’d watched the others swish through the room to dote on their girls, offering smiles, squeezing hands. But the dreadlocked nurse just shook the plate at her.

  “I’m not hungry,” Nadia said.

  “You need to eat. Can’t let you go until you do.”

  Nadia sighed, taking a cracker. Where was Luke? She was tired of this nurse, with her wrinkled skin and steady eyes. She wanted to be in her own bed, wrapped in her comforter, her head on Luke’s chest. He would make her soup and play movies on his laptop until she fell asleep. He would kiss her and tell her that she had been brave. The nurse uncrossed, then recrossed her legs.

  “Heard from your friend yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet, but he’s coming,” Nadia said.

  “You got someone else to call?”

  “I don’t need someone else, he’s coming.”

  “He’s not coming, baby,” the nurse said. “Do you have someone else to call?”

  Nadia glanced up, startled by the nurse’s confidence that Luke would not show, but even more jolted by her use of the word baby. A cotton-soft baby that seemed to surprise the nurse herself, like it had tripped off her tongue. Just like how after the surgery, in her delirium, Nadia had looked into the nurse’s blurred face and said “Mommy?” with such sweetness, the nurse had almost answered yes.

  TWO

  If Nadia Turner had asked, we would’ve warned her to stay away from him.

  You know what they say about pastors’ kids. In Sunday School, they’re running around the sanctuary, hollering, smearing crayons on the pews; in middle school, a pastor’s son chases girls, flipping up their dresses, while his sister smears on bright lipstick that makes her look like a harlot; by high school, the son is smoking reefer in the church parking lot and the daughter is being felt up in a bathroom stall by the deacon’s son, who is quietly unrolling the panty hose her mother insisted she wear because ladies don’t show their bare legs in church.

  Luke Sheppard, bold and brash with wispy curls, football-built shoulders, and that squinty-eyed smile. Oh, any of us could’ve told her to stay away from him. She wouldn’t have listened, of course. What did the church mothers know anyway? Not how Luke held her hand while they slept or played with her hair when they cuddled or how after she’d told him about the pregnancy test, he cradled her bare feet in his lap. A man who laced his fingers through yours all night and held your feet w
hen you were sad had to love you, at least a little bit. Besides, what did a bunch of old ladies know?

  We would’ve told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honey left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask your hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

  —

  TEN YEARS BEFORE Nadia Turner’s appointment, we’d already made our first visit to the abortion clinic downtown. Oh, not the way you’re thinking. By the time that clinic was built, we would’ve laughed like Sarah at the thought of having babies, unwanted or otherwise. Besides, we were already mothers then, some by heart and some by womb. We rocked grandbabies left in our care and taught the neighborhood kids piano and baked pies for the sick and shut-in. We all mothered somebody, and more than that, we all mothered Upper Room Chapel, so when the church started a protest out front, we joined too. Not like Upper Room was the type of church to fuss at every little thing it didn’t like. Shake fists at rated-R movies or buy armloads of rap CDs just to crush them or write letters to Sacramento to ensure the state’s list of banned books stayed long and current. In fact, the church had only protested once before, back in the seventies, when Oceanside’s first strip club was built. A strip club, minutes from the beach where children swam and played. What next, a brothel on the pier? Why not turn the harbor into a red-light district? Well, the Hanky Panky opened and even though it was a blight to the community, everyone agreed that the new abortion clinic was much worse. A sign of the times, really. An abortion clinic going up downtown just as easy as a donut shop.