The Mothers

by Brit Bennett

  CJ blew a puff of smoke toward the crumbling tile roof and tossed what was left of the joint in a puddle.

  “Still,” he said. “You better get that kid tested. If you even act like he’s yours, the state’s taking all your money. Happened to a dude I know. The laws are all fucked up.”

  “She didn’t keep it,” Luke said.

  “Well, shit.” CJ clapped him on the back. “That’s even easier. You got lucky, homie.”

  Luke didn’t feel lucky. When Nadia had first told him, he’d felt wired, the way he used to feel right after he’d finished lifting, like little sparks were running under his skin. Just to think, that morning his biggest worry had been getting to work on time so he wouldn’t get fired from his shitty job. And now a baby. A whole fucking baby. He felt terrible—she looked miserable, barely eating anything—but a small part of him had felt amazed by what they’d done. He’d helped create a whole new person, a person who’d never existed before in the entire world. Most days, the biggest thing he managed to accomplish was to recite the lunch specials from memory. He imagined rushing to the break room, once she left, to log on to the work computer and Google when pregnancy shows, how to stop pregnancy sickness, how much it costs to raise a child. Then Nadia told him she wanted an abortion. He’d promised he’d get her the money, even though he’d only saved two hundred for his apartment, wads of cash tucked in an orange Nike box under his bed. It had been all too easy to blow his paychecks on beer and sneakers, and he’d felt stupid, pulling his life’s savings out of a shoebox. How had he ever thought he could find a way to raise a kid?

  He hadn’t planned to leave her at the clinic. But the day of the appointment, when he slid his cell phone into his work locker like he did every day, it dawned on him how easy it was to walk away. He had done his part and she had done hers, and he would never have to see her again. He wouldn’t have to imagine what she might look like after the surgery—grief-stricken, in pain—or find the right words to comfort her. He wouldn’t have to tell her that she had made the right decision or that he felt like he had barely made a decision at all. He could just lock the phone up and walk away. This was his gift, a body tied to no one.

  But then he’d seen her at Cody Richardson’s party. And she hadn’t looked unpregnant. He’d only seen the word once before, years ago, when his father’s congregation had joined a protest out in front of the abortion clinic. He was just a boy then, clinging to his mother’s side because the other marchers made him nervous. A red-faced man in a camouflage puffy vest stomped around, chanting, “It’s a war out here, man, and we’re the front line.” An old black man held a sign that said ABORTION IS BLACK GENOCIDE. A nun carried a photo of a bloody baby’s head squeezed by forceps. There’s no such thing as an unpregnant woman, the sign read, just a mother of a dead baby. Years later, Luke hadn’t forgotten that sign. The word unpregnant had stuck with him even more than the graphic photograph—its finality, its sheer strangeness, not not pregnant but a different category of woman altogether. An unpregnant woman, he’d always thought, would somehow wear her unpregnancy as openly as pregnant women did. But when Nadia Turner had pushed inside the party, she looked no different than when he’d last seen her. Leggy in her high heels, a red blouse hugging her breasts, paining him with her prettiness. She wasn’t even crying. He was the weak one who couldn’t bring himself to face her.

  Now he couldn’t stop breaking things. If you dropped one dish during your shift, Charlie just humiliated you at the next staff meeting. Two and he took you off tables for the rest of the night. Luke counted the tip money in his pockets—fifteen dollars in crumpled ones and a few nickels. Not even gas money. He glanced at CJ, who was still grinning at him, in awe of his good fortune.

  “Guess I am lucky,” Luke said, blowing smoke into the sour air.

  —

  THAT SUMMER, Nadia spent more nights in Aubrey Evans’s bed than in her own.

  She slept on the right side, farthest from the bathroom, because Aubrey got up more in the middle of the night. In the morning, she brushed her teeth and left her toothbrush in the holder by the sink. She ate breakfast in the chair nearest the window, her feet bunched up on the edge of her seat. She drank her juice out of Kasey’s bright orange Vols cup. She left clothes in Aubrey’s room, accidentally at first—a sweatshirt forgotten on the back of a chair, a swimsuit left in the dryer—then she forgot things on purpose. Soon, when Monique dumped a laundry basket on the bed, the girls’ clothes tangled into an indistinguishable knot.

  It wasn’t hard to move into someone else’s life if you did it a little at a time. Aubrey no longer asked if she wanted to spend the night—after work, when they walked out to the parking lot, Aubrey unlocked the passenger’s side and waited for Nadia to climb inside. Aubrey was lonely too. She hadn’t made many friends at school. She’d spent more time volunteering at church than going to football games or dances. It was strange, learning the contours of another’s loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges.

  “You sure you’re not wearing out your welcome over there?” her father asked one night.

  “No,” she said. “Aubrey invited me.”

  “But you’re over there all the time now.”

  “So now you care where I go,” she said.

  He paused in her doorway. “Don’t get smart with me,” he said.

  She went anyway, even though on most nights, she and Aubrey did nothing at all, lounging on the couch, watching bad reality TV and painting each other’s nails. They drove downtown and ducked inside little shops at the harbor. Last summer, Nadia had worked there at Jojo’s Juicery, smiling plaintively while people squinted at the rainbow-colored menu above her head. She had daydreamed while following smoothie recipes on laminated index cards taped to the counter. She served rich white people, mostly, who strolled with pastel sweaters tied around their shoulders, as if carrying them was too much work. She had never been inside any of the harbor restaurants like Dominic’s Italian or Lighthouse Oysters—fancy places she could never afford—but she joked with the waiters sometimes when they came inside Jojo’s. A waitress at D’Vino’s told her how a Hollywood producer had yelled “Al dente! Al dente! That means ‘to the tooth’!” at her and sent his linguine back three times until it was firm enough. He was trying to impress his date, a weathered blonde woman who barely reacted, which just seemed sad—what was the point of being a Hollywood producer if you had to yell at waitresses to impress women? At least no one would try to impress a date at Jojo’s. During work, she liked to stare out the glass at the boats docked along the harbor, their colorful sails furled, but sometimes it made her sad. She’d never been inside a boat and they were docked twenty feet away. She’d never been anywhere.

  Some evenings, she stayed after work to help Aubrey volunteer. They packed food baskets for the homeless and cleaned Sister Willis’s classroom, scrubbing the chalkboards and scraping Play-Doh off the tables. On Friday nights, they hosted senior bingo, dragging in stacks of metal chairs, setting up snacks, and calling out numbers the seniors asked them to repeat at least three times. Other nights, the girls sipped smoothies along the harbor and peered into shop windows at trinkets. In the coming darkness, the boats bobbed and swayed, and later, when she crawled into Aubrey’s bed, Nadia felt like one of those boats, bobbing in place. She was leaving for college in two weeks. She was drifting between two lives, and as excited as she felt, she wasn’t quite ready to lose the life she’d found this summer.

  Sometimes Kasey grilled and they all ate dinner in the backyard, then walked down the street for Hawaiian shaved ice. Monique told them stories about work, about a hallucinating man who’d gouged his own eye out, a woman who’d fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a fence, nearly impaling herself on the post. One evening, she told them about a girl who had taken illegal abortion pills from Mexico and couldn’t brin
g herself to admit it until she almost bled out on the E.R. floor.

  “What happened to that girl?” Nadia asked later, while they all washed the dishes.

  “What girl?” Monique handed her a wet plate.

  “That girl. The one who took those pills from Mexico.”

  She still couldn’t bring herself to say the word abortion. Maybe it would sound different falling out of her mouth.

  “Horrible infection. But she pulled through. These girls are so afraid to tell someone they’re pregnant, they get these pills cheap online and no one knows what’s in them. She would’ve died if she hadn’t had enough sense to get help.” Monique handed Aubrey a plate. “Don’t you girls ever do something like that. You call me, okay? Or Kasey. We’ll take you to a doctor. Don’t ever try to do something like that on your own.”

  Nadia had read online about abortion pills, forty dollars and delivered to your door in a plain brown box. She would’ve ordered them herself if Luke hadn’t found her the money for the surgery. You didn’t know how desperate you could be until you were.

  “Do you think it’s bad?” she asked Aubrey later. “What that girl did?”

  “Of course. Mo said she almost died.”

  “No, not like that. I mean, do you think it’s wrong?”

  “Oh.” Aubrey flipped off the lights and the other half of the bed lowered beneath her weight. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just asking.”

  In the darkness of the room, she could barely make out Aubrey’s outline, let alone her face. In the darkness, talking felt safe. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Sometimes I wonder—” She paused. “If my mom had gotten rid of me, would she still be alive? Maybe she would’ve been happier. She could’ve had a life.”

  Any of her other friends would have gasped, turning to her with wide eyes. “Why would you even think that?” they would say, chiding her for entertaining such darkness. But Aubrey just squeezed her hand because she too understood loss, how it drove you to imagine every possible scenario that might have prevented it. Nadia had invented versions of her mother’s life that did not end with a bullet shattering her brain. Her mother, no longer cradling a tiny, wrinkled body in a hospital bed, an exhausted smile on her face, but seventeen and scared, sitting inside an abortion clinic, waiting for her name to be called. Her mother, no longer her mother, graduating from high school, from college, from graduate school even. Her mother listening to lectures or delivering her own, stationed behind a podium, running a toe up the back of her calf. Her mother traveling the world, posing on the cliffs of Santorini, her arms bent toward the blue sky. Always her mother, although in this version of reality, Nadia did not exist. Where her life ended, her mother’s life began.

  —

  THAT SUMMER, the girls drove to Los Angeles to explore different beaches. Somehow, sun and sand and salt water seemed better, more glamorous even, in the shadows of Hollywood. They wandered down Venice Beach, past weight-lifting jocks and weed dispensaries, T-shirt shops and churro stands and bucket drummers. They swam at Santa Monica Beach and drove through the winding cliffs to Malibu. Other places they went: downtown San Diego, where they rode trolleys across the city, window-shopping at Horton Plaza and walking around Seaport Village and sneaking into nightclubs in the Gaslamp district. Nadia sweet-talked a bouncer who let them into an underground club where shot glasses glowed red over the bar, industrial fans spun lazily overhead, and she had to scream into Aubrey’s ear to talk. They met boys. Boys tossing footballs on the beach, boys hanging out of car windows, boys smoking cigarettes in front of water fountains, boys, barely still boys, offering to buy them drinks in clubs. Boys bunched around them at the bar, and while Nadia flirted, Aubrey seemed to shrink within herself, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She’d never had a boyfriend before but how did she expect to ever find one if she never loosened up? So on one of her last nights in Oceanside, Nadia knew exactly where she wanted to take Aubrey: Cody Richardson’s house. Aubrey had never been, and in her waning days at home, Nadia felt nostalgic enough to return. Besides, if she was honest with herself, she also hoped she might see Luke. She’d imagined their good-bye—not dramatic, they weren’t dramatic people, but some final conversation where she would see, in his eyes, the realization that he’d hurt her. She wanted to feel his regret, for leaving her, for not loving her like he was supposed to. For once in her life, she wanted an ended thing to end cleanly.

  The night of the party, she sat on the edge of Aubrey’s bed, helping her friend with her makeup. She tilted Aubrey’s face toward her, gently sweeping gold eye shadow across her lids.

  “You have to wear the dress,” she said.

  “I told you, it’s too short.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “Every guy’s gonna want to hook up with you tonight.”

  Aubrey scoffed. “So? That doesn’t mean I want to hook up with them.”

  “Don’t you at least want to know what it’s like?”

  “What?”

  “Sex.” She giggled. “Just don’t expect it to be all beautiful and romantic. It’s gonna be awkward as hell.”

  “Why does it have to be awkward?”

  “Because—look, has any guy ever seen you naked?”

  Now Aubrey opened her eyes. “What?” she said.

  “I mean, what’s the furthest you’ve ever gone?”

  “I don’t know. Kissing, I guess.”

  “Jesus Christ. You’ve never even let a guy feel you up?”

  Aubrey shut her eyes again. “Please,” she said. “Can we talk about something else?”

  Nadia laughed. “You’re so cute,” she said. “I was never like you. I lost my virginity and . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t even talk to him anymore.”

  She’d never told Aubrey about Luke. She didn’t know how to explain their time together and she’d feel embarrassed trying to, because everything that had happened between them could be traced back to one of her own stupid choices. She was the one who’d gone to Fat Charlie’s day after day to see Luke. She had fallen in love with a boy who didn’t want anyone to know he was dating her. She’d started sleeping with him months before she was leaving for college and she hadn’t even insisted he wear a condom every time. She had been the type of foolish woman her mother had cautioned her never to be and she hated the idea of Aubrey knowing this about her.

  Aubrey opened her eyes again. They were watering, and Nadia dabbed a tissue, careful not to smear her eyeliner.

  “I wish I could be more like you,” Aubrey said.

  “Trust me,” Nadia said. “You don’t want to be like me.”

  That night, the beach was empty aside from the flicker of a bonfire past the lifeguard tower. Almost deserted, like their own private island. She reached for Aubrey’s hand, Aubrey lagging behind her, tugging at the black minidress.

  “Don’t let me drink too much,” she said.

  “That’s the point—we’re gonna loosen you up.”

  “Nadia, seriously. I’m such a lightweight.”

  “Oh, you can’t be that bad.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  Cody Richardson’s kitchen was more crowded than usual. Tall skaters in ripped skinny jeans howled over beer pong while beside them, three fat blondes counted out loud before downing tequila shots. On the floor, a pale, freckled girl passed a joint to two skinny boys who were too busy making out to notice. Nadia mixed Aubrey a drink, but she shook her head.

  “That’s too much,” she said, pushing the cup back.

  “It’s only two shots!”

  “You didn’t even measure it.”

  “I poured for two seconds. Same thing.”

  After her first cup, Aubrey started to relax. After her second, she was smiling, no longer caring that her dress almost showed her ass. After her third, she was dancing with a
boy who certainly cared that her dress almost showed her ass, so Nadia pulled her away before he got too handsy. Aubrey was an adorable drunk. She clung to Nadia, throwing her arms around her, toying with her hair. She plopped into her lap, an arm around her shoulder. She told Nadia she loved her, twice. Both times, Nadia laughed it off.

  “No,” Aubrey said, “I really do love you.”

  When was the last time anyone had told her that? She felt embarrassed that she couldn’t remember, so she pretended not to hear. She twisted open a bottle of water and handed it to Aubrey.

  “Have some,” she said, “before you puke.”

  Partying at Cody’s sober was a strange experience. She felt like she was in a museum, sneaking under the guardrails for a closer look at the exhibits. She noticed the details, the sadness behind smiles, the tired faces, strained with pretend happiness. She was comforted, in a way, to know that she wasn’t the only one who sometimes faked it. She finished her beer, barely buzzed, while Aubrey tried to goad her into drinking more.

  “I can’t,” Nadia said. “I’m driving.”

  “But you’re not even having fun!”

  “I am . . .”

  Aubrey pouted. “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am, and you’re having fun. That’s the point.”

  “But you’re just sitting there.”

  “I’m having fun through you,” she said.

  And she was, oddly enough, even though she was sober, even though she was disappointed that she hadn’t seen Luke. She felt grateful, almost, watching Aubrey party with the giddiness of someone who had just wrenched herself free of her body.

  —

  “JESUS, AUBREY.” Nadia hooked an arm around her waist as she helped her up Monique and Kasey’s driveway. “You are a lightweight.”

  “I’m not that drunk.”

  “Oh yes you are—”

  “No . . .”

  “Yes, you fucking are.” She fumbled through Aubrey’s purse for the gold house key. “Now, shut up, okay? Everyone’s probably sleeping.”