Push

by Claire Wallis

  “You shouldn’t be sad, Emma,” he says, wiping his thumbs across my cheeks. “All those things that happened—they shaped me. If those women hadn’t failed me, as you put it, I would not be here with you. I wouldn’t be strong enough to be with you. I wouldn’t be able to recognize how different you are. How different you make me feel. How different I am when I’m with you. I am not the same person I was when I was with Anna or Kelsey or even Lucia. And that is because of you, Emma. You.”

  David holds my face and looks down at me for a long time. My mind is cluttered with thoughts of these women and David’s words. As I collect myself, I realize that the tears falling down my cheeks are no longer out of sadness. They are out of pride and happiness and love. Love for this man who has put my very own emotions into words.

  “I know what you mean,” I say with a small smile, “because that’s exactly how I feel.”

  His lips press into a small grin, and I can see both hope and uncertainty on his face. He is still unsure of us. Somehow, I’m going to have to prove to David that I am never going to fail him. That I am more sure of my love for him than I have ever been of anything else.

  “It’s late,” he says. As he stands, he pulls me up and hugs me.

  “Are you leaving?” I ask.

  “You need to sleep—but I’m not tired,” he says quietly. “As long as it’s okay with you, I’ll stay until you fall asleep and then I’ll go back and help the guys clean up and count. But I’ll be here when you wake up tomorrow morning.”

  “Good,” I say. “I like to wake up with you sleeping in my bed. You look like a little boy when you’re asleep.”

  “Is that so?” he says, pulling away from me and tilting his head to the side.

  “Yes. A sweet little sleepy boy—all covered in birds,” I say to him with a coy smile. “My bright little bird,” I add, recalling his mother’s nickname for him when he was small. His eyes immediately leave mine and sink to the floor. I regret my comment instantly. What a stupid fucking thing to say.

  David lets go of me and steps away. I think he is going to say something, but his lips remain closed. He lies down, puts his hands behind his head, and crosses one straight leg over the other. I don’t want to say anything else, so I get ready for bed, set my alarm, and switch off the lamp. I snuggle my head on to his chest and wrap my arms and legs around him. His arm drops down from his head and cradles my shoulders as he pulls me into his chest.

  “I should tell you about my mom someday,” he says very quietly. “Maybe tomorrow.” I hear a twinge of eagerness in his voice, and I think that maybe my comment wasn’t so fucking stupid after all. “I’ll pick you up from work. We can go somewhere fun.”

  “Okay,” I say, planting a small kiss on his chest through the fabric of his hoodie.

  “Good night, Emma.”

  “Good night.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Maggie

  I am standing on this bridge thinking about my life and wondering how things got so far off track. I wasn’t supposed to stay in this hellhole of a town, married to a man who will never amount to anything more than what he already is. I was supposed to be in Rome or London or New York City long ago, leading a life filled with excitement and meaning and brilliance. But instead, I am here. In the same town I grew up in, where everything is dull and achingly mundane and colorless. Where every day is filled with the same old crap. The same old loneliness. Even my bright little bird can’t change that.

  Shep and I met twelve years ago when I was working at the diner, hoping to make enough tips for a bus ticket out of this place. From that day on, we spent every second we could together, talking about all the places we were going to go. All the places we were going to live. Paris, Johannesburg, Moscow—our plan was to go somewhere, anywhere, and find a job that would earn us just enough to buy a ticket to our next destination. We were going to travel the world together. But first, Shep said he had to go to trade school. He had to learn a universal trade that he could use in any of the places we wanted to go, that would make him money wherever we went. So he dropped out of community college and enrolled in a technical school. He needed two years to become a carpenter. Two years and we would be out of here; on our own and living the adventurous life we both desired. I worked at the diner while he went to school, and we moved in together to save on rent. We lived over McMillan’s Grocery, and we cooked our meals on a hot plate and made love every night. We were happy knowing that the life we were living was not going to be forever. Shep asked me to marry him a year after we met, and my mother’s minister performed the ceremony in her living room a few weeks later. We declared our eternal love for each other on my mother’s green shag carpet. I was wearing a blue dress, and Shep was in his only suit. He had to borrow a tie from my brother.

  Two years turned into three, then into four. Shep had to get a night job stocking shelves at the grocery store and cut down on his classes so we could pay for both our rent and his schooling. We ate a lot of dented cans of soup to make ends meet, but we always did it. There was a map of the world tacked up on our kitchen wall to remind us that it would all be worth it someday. Because someday, we would get on that airplane and get the hell out of here.

  By the time Shep finished trade school, we had quite a bit of money in the bank. We almost had enough to buy a pair of tickets to Frankfurt and cover the first few months’ rent on a little farmhouse we found through a housing cooperative. But then my mother died. She didn’t have any life insurance, and my brother was broke. We had to use well over half of the money we’d saved to pay for her burial service. Shep was not happy about it, and neither was I. My mother had taken out a reverse mortgage on her house a few years before, so when she died, the bank owned the house, and my brother and I were left on our own. He moved to Arizona, and Shep and I stayed above the grocery store. Working and saving and making love.

  Shep started drinking a few months after I found out I was pregnant. He wanted me to get rid of it. But I told him that a baby didn’t have to stop us. That we could still go to Beijing and Barcelona and Milan; we could go as a family. There was still time. But he didn’t believe me, and he started going to Peyton’s every day after working his carpentry job. He started coming home later and later every night. By the time David came into the world, Shep was well on his way to becoming an alcoholic. I missed the old Shep, but my bright little bird kept me busy.

  David was a beautiful toddler with the temperament of a cool, quiet ocean. He seldom cried or asked for anything beyond the bare necessities. He liked to carry things around with him, and then drop them wherever he pleased. He would fill his arms with books or crayons or kitchen utensils or stuffed toys, and then systematically spread them around the apartment. When I would scold him for making a mess, he would look at me with his big eyes, and then he would set about picking everything up and doing it all over again. His kindergarten teacher later said that he was the most well-behaved child in the room. He followed all the rules, raising his hand before speaking and helping the other children when they needed it. But the teacher was worried about him. About our family, actually, because David would come to school and tell her about how his daddy was good at yelling and screaming and making his mommy cry. I told her not to worry about it, that David had quite an imagination. She smiled and told me to let her know if I ever needed anything. That night, I spanked David and told him to never talk about his daddy like that. Your daddy works hard, I told him, and it’s nobody’s business what happens in our house. At the next parent-teacher conference, David’s teacher said that he had stopped talking completely. He stopped raising his hand and offering to help the other children. She wanted us to get him help, but I told her that David was just shy. He would be fine.

  By the time David went to first grade, he was talking again, and he knew how to stay out of his father’s way. He knew that when Shep came home from Peyton’s, he needed to be asleep in his bed—or at least pretending to be. Shep liked to come home at night an
d make drunken love to me. He liked to look at the map still hanging on our kitchen wall and yell at me about why I had to have that child. Ever since David was born, I have tried my best to appease Shep, telling him that someday we’ll still go to all those places. We’ll still see it all. I’m sure David has heard every word we’ve said in that kitchen over the years. I’m sure he knows his arrival has caused nothing but chaos for me and Shep.

  I started calling David my bright little bird the night I caught him trying to fly out of his bedroom window with a pair of ingenious homemade wings. He had made them out of cardboard and colored turkey feathers and butcher’s string. They were clever, but they certainly weren’t clever enough to work. I pulled him back into the room just before he jumped and told him that if he tried to fly he would just end up breaking his leg and pissing off his father. He tore off the wings and threw them into the garbage. That was the first time I saw him cry since he was a baby. It was a week after his seventh birthday.

  I’d been short-circuiting for a long time before David’s flying attempt, always lamenting over the pile of dashed dreams that had become my life, but somehow, I always managed to function. I always managed to keep myself together. I never allowed the depression sink all the way in. But over time, the sadness seeped into my bones and ate away at my brain. I stopped getting out of bed in the morning. I stopped doing the laundry and the dishes and the housework. I stopped letting Shep make love to me. I stopped caring about anything. I felt myself slipping into a place plagued by doubt and regret and loneliness. I felt myself starting to sputter out. Shep saw it. He had to see it. But he didn’t do anything about it. He just ignored me and our life together, choosing instead to sleep on the couch and drink with his friends.

  And my bright little bird has been watching me the whole time. Watching me fall. He’s seen me crying, alone in my room in the middle of the day. He’s watched me stumble around the house, unwashed and unkempt. He’s seen me lock myself into the basement for days just so I wouldn’t have to face the sunlight. My bright little bird has stared at me while I ate rotten food simply because I could not bring myself to go to the grocery store. He has gone hungry because of me. And the thought of it all makes me sink deeper. The thought of him suffering because of me makes my insides hurt. It makes my brain and my muscles and my bones and my heart ache for the life I have forced on to him. And for the life I was supposed to lead.

  And now I am trapped in this acidic life from which I see no escape. Only sameness and hurt and guilt. Guilt for bringing this little boy into a world where he wasn’t welcome. For my own inability to make it a better place for him. For my ineptitude at motherhood. I am ashamed of myself and I hate myself for not being able to love my bright little bird the way that I should.

  I walk back over to the car and look inside the window. David is asleep in the back seat. Curled into himself, his chest rising and falling softly. Sometimes he looks so grown up, and yet here he is looking so very small. He is growing into a very self-sufficient boy. Now that he is eight, he gets himself off to school every day. He’s does his own laundry—and mine, too. He keeps the apartment neat and tidy so that when Shep comes home, there is not a single thing out of place. David does all of this while I sit in my room listening to my mind splinter into pieces.

  But because he is already capable of so much, I know that my bright little bird will be fine, despite the incompetence of his mother. Of that I am sure. He is old enough now to look after himself, and as long as he keeps staying out of Shep’s way, they’ll be fine together. David will be happier not having to think about me, and maybe, just maybe, Shep will find someone else. Someone who makes him breakfast in the morning and makes love to him at night. Someone who can take care of him. Maybe, if they’re lucky, it will be someone who can love David the way I never could. She’ll love them both, and they’ll forget all about me. Everything left inside me hopes that it comes true.

  I pop open the trunk of the car and lift out a pair of sandbags, setting them on the ground beside me. It is a quiet night, and I haven’t seen a single car cross the bridge since we got here. I will do this quickly, and when David wakes up in the morning, he will see the note I pinned to his shirt. When he reads it, he will believe that I loved him, and he will want to love me back, even though I don’t deserve it. I need him to live the rest of his life believing that I loved him and that all those things Shep and I said in the kitchen weren’t true. If he believes these things, then maybe, for just one moment, I was a good mother. Maybe I didn’t fail him entirely. Maybe I did something right.

  I drag the sandbags to the edge of the bridge and slide them under the guardrail. I climb over the top and begin to tie them to my ankles with two pieces of rope. I tie the knots as tightly and as quickly as I can. When I stand back up, I hear the car door close. The sound of it causes me to still, and after I take a breath, I turn my head around and see David standing right next to me. He is looking down at the bags, and the envelope pinned to his shirt is flapping in the wind. One of his hands is on top of the guardrail and the other is reaching for my arm, but I pull away before he can touch me. His hand drops to his side. When he asks me what I am doing, I tell him to get back into the car and go back to sleep. But he doesn’t move. He just stands there, watching me. I put my hand on his cheek and smile at him.

  He shouldn’t be here.

  But he is.

  I crouch down and slide the sandbags off the bridge. Their weight pulls my feet over the edge, and I lean my body forward. As I drop through the air, I hear David’s voice. I hear him yelling, but I can’t hear what he is saying. And then I hit the water.

  As the sandbags pull me down through the darkness, I look up to the surface. At the center of a circle of white cast by one of the bridge lights, I see the bottom of David’s shoes. He is kicking in the water above me. I see his hands swirling around, probing the water, feeling for a part of me. And then, as I sink, I see his face. I see the face of my bright little bird. His cheeks are puffed with a breath of air, and his eyes are searching the water. He is swimming down, toward me, with his hands out and his eyes wide open. I feel a rush of air leave my lungs and see the bubbles rise toward him. And then I am gone.

  Chapter Forty

  Emma—Present Day

  When I hear the alarm go off, I am lying on my side, and David’s body is nestled behind me. His arm is draped over my waist, and I can feel his breath on my neck. I switch off the clock, trying hard not to wake him. I want to lie here with his quiet body for a few minutes before I have to peel myself out of bed and get ready for work.

  I don’t smell whisky or stale cigarettes. I just smell David. For some reason, his “sleepy smell” reminds me of honey—mellow and earthy. I’m reminded of how, as a small child, I used to enjoy the scent of our little dog when she uncurled herself from a nap. Her “sleepy smell” was reminiscent of a newly opened bag of corn chips, and when my father died and my mother sent her to live with another family, I missed that smell more than anything else about her. She was a little rough around the edges. I smile at the silly comparison between David Calgaro and Sasha the Sheltie: intoxicating “sleepy smells” and a little rough around the edges.

  As I inhale David and think of my childhood, I wonder about his. I wonder if he had a pet. I wonder if he liked school. I wonder what his mother was like. I hope she loved her bright little bird. I hope she protected him from his alcoholic father better than my mother protected me. It brings me a little comfort knowing that, even though all of David’s girlfriends have somehow failed him, perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps, when she was still alive, he felt loved. Perhaps she hugged him and ruffled his hair and kissed him on the cheek before he stepped onto the school bus every morning. Perhaps she made him dinner and laid out a pair of freshly washed pajamas every night. Perhaps she took him to the movies and out for ice cream and did all the beautiful, loving things a mother is supposed to do. All the things my own mother did before my father died. I hope David was happy then
. But somehow I doubt it. He told me a few days after we met that he didn’t believe his parents wanted the child they already had. Still...maybe he was loved and just didn’t know it.

  I feel his legs move behind mine, his hips press into my back, and his hand swipe slowly across my belly.

  “Good morning,” he says quietly. “Are you going to get up and go to work?”

  “Nah,” I say, “I think I’ll just stay here with you all day.”

  “That would be nice,” he says, running his hand up to the top of my hip and resting it there. “I thought maybe you had fallen back to sleep.”

  “Nope. I was just lying here thinking.”

  “About?”

  “You and your sleepy smell.”

  “My what?”

  “Your sleepy smell. You know, it’s what you smell like when you’re asleep. Everyone has a sleepy smell.”

  “Really?” he says, keeping his voice quiet and his body still. “And what is my sleepy smell?”

  “Well, on Wednesday mornings you usually smell like a drunken gambler, but your usual sleepy smell is like honey.”

  “Seriously?” I can feel his head draw back when he says it. “Honey?”

  “Yep. Honey. It’s a good smell. I used to have a dog that smelled like corn chips when she slept, so at least your smell is better than that.”

  “I don’t think so. Corn chips are more manly than honey. Can’t you say I smell like something more masculine? I don’t know, like motor oil or exhaust or something?”

  “Okay, then I’ll take back the honey smell and replace it with sawdust. How about that, carpenter man? Is that manly enough for you?” I am smiling from ear to ear, and I’m nearly laughing as I say it. But I feel him tighten after the words are out. I roll over, and I can see on his face that I have said something wrong.

  “No. Not sawdust,” he says as I lift my hand to brush his cheek. “My dad used to smell like sawdust. And Scotch. A whole lot of Scotch.”