Colleen Olle By Colleen Olle
CW: miscarriage/child loss
After misting our houseplants, wilting in an unseasonable September heat, I clomp into the fifth-floor laundry room with a basketful of clothes and find Janet and her three-year-old. Her right arm half-sunk inside the top-load machine, Janet glances over her shoulder and flashes me a smile. We met four years ago, shortly after her family moved into this building. I was in between jobs—a lost liberal arts major and former assistant manager at the big-chain bookstore now attending the community college for an AS in horticulture—and since she, a stay-at-home mom, seemed nice, we would visit with one another. She cried on my couch after her cat got run over. I reminisced about my grandmother on the second anniversary of her sudden passing.
Occasionally Janet, our husbands, and I would dine out or, if they couldn’t get a sitter, barbecue at home. For entertainment we played card games, trading partners to keep things lively. Whereas my husband, Reide, excelled at strategy and vied to win, Walt was good-natured and easygoing, more in it for the laughs than anything else. I, too, preferred the camaraderie to any sort of competition. Janet, however, sometimes grew overly serious and picked on Walt and me, if we happened to be her partner. Nothing severe, but irritating, like a nettle in your sock.
She acts like the older sister I never had and now, I think, do not care to have.
Janet’s little girl pokes her head through a bra strap and sticks out her tongue.
“Sabetha,” Janet scolds.
The little girl giggles and squashes the buttercream lace cup over her face.
“Remember Miss Kate? Be nice now.”
Janet apologizes for making me wait, explains that she wants to instill good work habits in her daughter. Teach her how to help others. I manage a nod and thumb through a discarded Cosmo, unable to fathom work habits for myself, let alone a toddler, let alone comprehend: curvaceous bodies; fashion choices beyond flip-flops and hair elastics; the green happy pills I’m supposed to ingest twice a day; and—especially—the how-to-please-your-man articles. I have a waking nightmare of Reide buying a stack of these magazines and scattering them like ant traps throughout our apartment in the hope that sooner or later I’ll succumb, smear perfume samples on my wrists, and hop into bed to touch myself while he watches. Jumpstart our sex life, lift me out of my fog.
Has anyone published a magazine called Real Women Move On?
Janet loads the last of her clothes into the two dryers, so I drop the magazine, pour detergent, and dump a month’s worth of soiled socks and rank underwear into the first washer. (Reide will be relieved and maybe a little proud.)
More than anything, I want to fall back into my stupor on our couch, but Janet invites me to her place for cookies and Coke. On my fifth “sick” day in two weeks from Green Jeans Flower Farm, I’ve no real excuse to say no. Cocooning in our apartment has neither cured my heartsickness nor elevated my mood and may even stunt my professional growth.
Yesterday, Ms. Green Jeans herself warned me that if I don’t shape up, she’ll be forced to scale back my hours, make me part-time or seasonal at best. I need four more months, another 640 hours, to be eligible to take the California Certified Nursery Professional exam next February. Maybe visiting with Janet will keep me from calling in sick tomorrow, or spur me to study my plant flashcards or, at the very least, help me focus on something other than my defective, duplicitous body.
In the stairwell, she confesses, as if to seal the deal, “I’ve been hoarding Mint Milanos.”
Like a plant afflicted with stem rot, the backs of my knees go soft. I haven’t eaten any Milano cookies since the morning my stomach refused to keep them down. Week 9.
Janet touches my arm, steadies me at the elbow. “Are you okay? Is it the heat?”
I shake my head, but a few tears seep out, dampening my cheeks.
“Oh, Kate, I’m sorry. Never mind. I should’ve….We don’t need junk food. Reide said you’ve been having—”
She cuts herself off and helps Sabetha open the fourth-floor door.
“What,” I demand. “What did he say?”
Janet lowers her basket on a sunflower welcome mat and pulls out her keys. Sabetha hops and squats and flicks out her tongue. “Ribbit,” she says, “ribbit, ribbit.”
“He’s…worried about you is all.”
When Reide and I got married three years ago, we agreed we wanted to be child-free. I took the Pill pretty faithfully, my husband chiding me the handful of times it slipped my mind. He wanted no accidents, no surprises. We got both.
Once the seed was planted, so to speak, the idea of keeping it sprouted, rooting itself in my husband’s mind. I should’ve argued. I should’ve held my ground and driven myself to the nearest clinic. But after eight years together, the lines between “his” and “mine” had blurred and blended into “ours.” I thought maybe the hormones would rewire my circuits, jolt me with maternal juices, metamorphose my thinking as thoroughly as my body. That, like Reide, I’d have a change of heart.
I take a seat at the round oak table beneath the ceiling fan, while Sabetha skips into the living room through a minefield of toys. She parts the blinds, angled to keep the sun out, and shoves her nose against the sliding screen door.
“I wanna swim, Mommy.”
Janet picks her way through plastic action figures, Playskool people, and alphabet blocks and erects a drying rack next to the TV. “Let’s wait for your brother to come home.” Crouching, she removes a blouse from the basket and drapes it out to dry.
I gulp my water, listen to Janet exclaim about the heat wave, how the climate in California measures up against weather in Abilene, the exorbitant price of Bay Area housing. Above the TV and into the hall, hangs a collection of black-and-white photographs—silos and haystacks, tractor parts and meadowlarks, honeybees on sunflowers, dilapidated barns cloaked in snow.
“Back home, everyone had air at least.” Wistfully, she fingers the “Kansas is a Band” button pinned to her denim shortalls and then, gripping the sides of the laundry basket, plows a clear path around the couch.
I swipe my palms on the seat cushion and wonder if I’ve made a mistake in coming. The air is hot and thick as crib bedding.
“We had our own house too. Everyone did.”
“Must have been nice,” I say, yearning for a moment to trade places and live in the stark, barbed-wire heart of nowhere.
While Janet disappears into the bedroom, I select an orange, slice it, and arrange the segments on the cutting board. Sabetha scampers toward me, crooking a stuffed black bear in her arm and dragging two Disney dolls by the hair. She holds Snow White aloft by her cape so I can stroke the puffy yellow skirt, the high, silken collar. Then she lays her dolls on the chair and declares “naptime.” Snow White and her mermaid pal, Ariel, beam up at us with cinnamon-red smiles.
“I don’t think they’re tired,” I say.
Sabetha sighs and drapes the dolls’ hair over their painted, insomniac eyes. I swallow another orange slice and wipe my fingers on a paper towel. Sabetha licks her lips. Peeping out at me from behind her stuffed bear, she bares her teeth and growls.
“Biscuit hungry.”
“Biscuit’s always hungry,” says Janet, padding into the kitchen.
Sabetha roars, so I hand her a small section of orange. Her tiny teeth bite down but cannot tear the flesh from the rind. She sucks noisily, drains the juice from the pulp, devours the fruit vampire-style.
Week 11, I sank my teeth into a medium-rare bacon cheeseburger sprinkled with shreds of horseradish. An astonishing feat for a decade-long vegetarian. Reide dabbed some mustard off my cheek, ran his fingers through my hair, watching my jaws work, enraptured, as I masticated the meat. When I asked him to fetch some pickle relish from another table, he flattened his palms against his thighs and said, “In a minute, kitty cat.” Shifting on his bar stool, he directed his gaze to one of the TVs. I laughed and chewed the patty with an exaggerated moan.
“Knock it off,” Reide said, focusing on the screen and trying not to grin. “You’re causing a scene.”
“Is that what you call it?” I teased.
These days, Reide causes scenes without me. Late at night when he thinks I’m asleep, his hand grips my hip or spreads flush against my thigh. The sheets rustle, the mattress dips. He shudders, quivers, then gasps or sighs. I like the gasps better, believing—hoping—they reveal a rush of pleasure, a kind of release, while the sighs—labored, enfeebled—betray, I fear, what’s between us and what has already gone.
Finished tidying, Janet prepares a plate of peanut butter crackers, pours me an iced tea, and sits down with her own sugar-free lemonade. I move the dolls onto the table so Sabetha can have the chair.
“You woke them,” Sabetha says. “That’s my job.” She grabs her babies and scowls.
“Be nice, Betha Lynne,” Janet warns, “or no peanut butter and no pool.”
We talk about the weather, our families, the rising price of milk and gasoline. Janet gripes about the upstairs neighbor’s Chihuahua barking last night, waking her and Walt with its ruckus. I acknowledge that Reide and I are lucky to live on the ground floor yet offer nothing more. We watch Sabetha play but skirt the subject of children in general. From time to time, Janet shoots me sad, indulgent smiles I endeavor to ignore.
She offers me a sample packet of conditioner, which would be weird and downright insulting considering the state of my tangled, unwashed hair if she hadn’t done it before, and hands me some coupons for soy and veggie products. I mumble about not having had time to clip any for her, despite having seen among our newspaper ads coupons for juice boxes, ice cream treats, and Lakin’s green-colored ketchup.
Janet squeezes my hand and says she understands. “You have more important things to think about right now.”
Her sincerity catches me off guard.
* * * *
February through April, I’d inventoried my aches and complaints, my sufferings and sacrifices. Okay, so I had stubble on my chin and back. But what about that gorgeous mane?
“It puts Nicole Kidman’s locks to shame,” said Janet at Week 20.
Using the push handle, she helped Sabetha navigate her tricycle over a bump in the sidewalk. They’d approached me while I was stuck waiting to cross the street at the bottom of our driveway. We were headed for the same block: they to the park and I to the library.
“What about indigestion and heartburn?” I countered, pumping my arms as we climbed a hill. “What about enough gas to resolve our fuel dependence on the Middle East?”
“Temporary inconveniences, the dues we mothers pay. Another couple weeks,” Janet said, “and you’ll feel better.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” I yanked my zipper and flapped the sides of my jacket, wishing that I’d skipped the exercise and taken my car. Wishing I were already sunk in a comfortable chair and immersed in a world of talking lions and evil sorcerers, where magical women vanquish those who endeavor to enslave them.
Janet smiled and hummed to herself. Her cheery matter-of-factness did nothing to soothe me. On the contrary, I resented her smugness; her good-natured but unsolicited rosy reminiscences about her own journey into motherhood; the hand-me-down maternity blouses she foisted upon me; the graceful way she maneuvered her size-fourteen self between a fire hydrant and the curb so as to accommodate my cumbrous girth. And the fact that she tolerated—no, indulged—all my moods, as if I were a sixth grader whose fears and pains seemed comical and exaggerated, outmoded even, to the college-bound sister who knew better and had seen it all.
I swung my canvas book bag from one shoulder to the other and swiped my sleeve across my cheek.
“C’mon, honey, take a deep breath,” Janet said.
I sucked in and expelled a lungful of pollen-thick air, my throat catching on a sob. “God,” I muttered, “I wish this hadn’t happened.”
“Oh, Kate.” Janet let go of the push handle and gripped me by the shoulders. “You don’t mean that. You’re nervous and moody is all.”
“I do mean it,” I said, thrusting out my chin. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
She arched an eyebrow and laughed. “Sure I do, sweetie. I’ve been there twice before.”
“For me,” I snapped, shaking her off. “You don’t know what it’s like for me.”
Perhaps if I hadn’t been feeling so queasy and hopeless that day. Perhaps if Reide and I hadn’t moved across the country, away from family and friends, or if my mother hadn’t believed she was fulfilling her God-given role in bearing and raising six children, five boys and me—if she had ever betrayed any doubts—I might’ve kept my mouth shut.
Clenching my book bag beneath my arm, I stomped forward, heedlessly crushing an ant hill, ready to let Janet struggle alone to free Sabetha’s tricycle, its front wheel caught abruptly in a gap of uneven concrete. But then I heard the girl yelp, and I turned back round. Janet had seemingly pushed hard enough to cause the tricycle to tip. Halfway off the seat, Sabetha clung with one hand to the joint between the handlebars.
“You push, I’ll pull,” I said to Janet. I grabbed the handlebars and tugged.
Once Sabetha and her trike were righted and on smoother ground, I dropped my bag and kneaded my knuckles into the small of my back. My bowels churned. Janet cooed at her daughter and then, canting her hip, regarded me impassively as if I were just another fretful toddler.
Yes, there were moments when I was alone, that I palmed my swollen belly and crooned to the baby, but the uncertainty about whether I was growing attached or merely playing a part persisted. Other times, I felt like an imposter or, worse, a victim of an alien predator that had appropriated my womb. I longed to yank it out, to rid myself of the creature that had commandeered my body, my dreams, my mind. Halfway through and the happy hormones weren’t working, the maternal urges that imbued Janet and my own mom with the patience and love of Mother Mary herself had not gushed through me. Besides, even from an early age, I’d intuited how much of herself my mom sacrificed with each pregnancy and child, until her defining role, her identity, was Mom. I had no desire to succumb.
“You don’t know,” I said, snatching up my books, thrusting an arm through the canvas bag handles. “You don’t. This isn’t what, we didn’t mean for this, God knows I never, never wanted to be a mother.”
Janet’s mouth fell open, forming a small o. She fixed her eyes on me, then looked away in disappointment, as if I’d disparaged something she held dear, which, thoughtlessly, I had. Except for a brief stint as a paralegal, Janet, as far as I knew, had never pursued a profession. Motherhood was her career, as it had been for my own mother. They believed, as their faiths—Janet’s Lutheranism and my mom’s Catholicism—teach, that motherhood is a sacred vocation, one that I should also embrace. But I didn’t. Despite my own Catholic faith and the pervasive cultural message that being a woman entails procreation, and the biological clock society encouraged me to heed, in some fundamental way, I couldn’t relate. Between Janet and me, a chasm opened.
Eventually, I managed to produce a couple of yawns and pleaded sleep-deprivation. “You know how it is,” I said, smiling weakly, trying too late to claim sisterly solidarity.
“Do I,” she said. She looked away, busied her hands by prying at a piece of tape wrapped around the trike’s push handle. “You’re right,” she said, as Sabetha resumed her pedaling. “It’s different for everybody, isn’t it?”
I nodded hopefully, ventured another smile.
And then, leaning over, she patted my belly and said, “Of course it is. We wanted ours.”
* * * *
For days, I obsessed about what I would say if Janet told Reide what I’d confessed. He knew, of course, that physically I felt miserable and ascribed my cranky, weepy, fretful moods to changes in my body, but emotionally, mentally, I’d kept him in the dark. He was doing so well, working extra hours and saving more to welcome our unexpected addition. When he brought home gifts for me or the baby, I could not, did not want to disappoint.
The next time I saw her, Janet acted as if everything were normal. I wondered if she might be putting on a front for the sake of our friendship, hiding how badly I had offended her. But if she were truly hurt, wouldn’t she tell me? Or would she bide her time and wait for an opportunity, say at a barbecue, to drop a hint about or call me out on my anti-motherhood mindset? Then again, maybe my careless remark hadn’t shaken her to the core. Maybe she was simply praying for me, that I might one day see the light and accept my God-given role.
Now, while Janet straightens a wall plaque that says Family Is a Blessing that Lasts Forever, I tap my foot against the carpet and consider beating a retreat and reclaiming the depression I’ve made in our living room couch, but Janet, smiling broadly, plops back down onto her chair.
“I saw Reide the other day,” she says, as Sabetha crawls into her lap. “He came to Lakin’s school, for a talk on safety. I drove Lakin to school that morning. When I saw Reide, I thought I’d stay and listen. You’d never know it one-on-one, but he’s great at public speaking.”
Her tone sounds enthusiastic, a bit too gratified, but maybe, I think, because Sabetha is part of the audience. I match her smile, trying to puzzle out what, if anything, she’s getting at.
“He looked tired.”
“He’s working long shifts,” I say.
“Anyway,” says Janet, “I invited him out for coffee.”
This is news to me. “That’s nice,” I say.
“It was nice, getting to see him like that, I mean on his beat in his uniform. Much more impressive than watching Walt tap at his computer.”
A small, tight smile creeps over my lips. “Yeah, uniforms do that to us, don’t they?”
Janet chuckles and raps her fingertips against her glass. “I hope you don’t mind, that I treated him to coffee and muffins.”
“Why should I?”
“Some women, you know, get funny like that.” Around the fringe of a placemat, she ravels and unravels her finger.
“Reide and I understand one another.”
“I’m sure you do, hon.”
“So,” I say, still wondering why Reide hadn’t mentioned it, “you went for coffee?”
She nods. “He looks thinner. Has he lost weight?”
I shrug and, although it bothers me to betray ignorance again, answer truthfully that I don’t know.
“Well, he wolfed down his muffin, that’s for sure. He would’ve eaten another, a dozen more—if I’d offered.” She pauses and adds, “We had a good time. Both of us.”
I cock my head and picture my trim, law-defending, loving husband eating a blueberry muffin from Janet’s hand, licking buttery crumbs from her blunt fingertips. Handcuffing her to the bed.
My eyes narrow. “He told you that?”
She shakes her head once, then stops, regards me with a pained-yet-stoic look, as if she were a farmhand about to brand her favorite calf.
“He said that he’d like to get out more often, that maybe—” She tucks her legs beneath her chair and, moistening a paper towel against her glass, dabs at her forehead, pats the length of her pale neck. “—maybe we should do it again sometime. His eyes looked kinda…lonesome.”
Janet glances at her watch, picks some cracker crumbs up from her placemat, and flicks them onto the plate.
“Just so you know, Kate, I would never…I mean it was spur-of-the-moment, I wasn’t even wearing lipstick…but someone else might….Thank goodness he doesn’t have a secretary, right? You know what I mean?”
“No,” I start to say. But then clear my throat a bit and amend it to, “or, yes, I do.”
Janet swallows the dregs of her lemonade and smacks her lips.
Too stunned to say more, I drain my iced tea and wonder: Is Reide as lonely and lost as I am?
* * * *
With twenty minutes left on the drying cycle and probably, too, on my impromptu visit, Janet moves to her brown suede recliner and switches on the TV.
“Oprah or Judge Judy?” she asks.
Shrugging, I push open the screen door and step outside. Heat shimmers up inside the semi-enclosed balcony. I lean my forearms against the railing, beside a window box of withered annuals—mostly mums, coneflowers, and spindly dahlias. Hardy survivors of Janet’s black thumb.
Four stories below, a blue rectangle ripples and gurgles. The water looks deceptively cool; in fact, it’s heated to 78 degrees, which is still cooler than our apartment. More than once this week, Reide has encouraged me to go for a dip.
“All I have are bikinis,” I said.
“You look good in a bikini.”
“I used to, maybe. Not now.”
My bare feet prickle on the gritty cement. I’ve left my flip-flops near Janet’s front door. A scrub jay swoops and screeches in the pine branches, while goldfinches pull on the pods of a Western redbud. They extract and devour the bean-like seeds, which will pass through the birds’ gizzards, get dunked in the digestive acids, and emerge with thinner seed coats, more permeable and ready for germination. Our wholesale nursery sometimes replicates this biological process and scarifies seeds to awaken them. Fine sandpaper works wonders on seeds of four-o’clocks and morning glories. We steep others—lupine, holly, wild indigo—in sulfuric acid, then rinse and soak them in water. The trick, of course, is learning how to roughen and soften the hard outer layer without damaging the embryo inside.
* * * *
Week 23. Our son didn’t flow out of me. The doctor had to cut and lift him out.
Later, the nurse asked me if I wanted to hold “the fetus.” I shook my head, confused, appalled. Why—how—would I hold a fetus?
To my shock and indignation, Reide told the nurse yes and moments later took the bundle from her. But I realized that he was right: the baby belonged to both of us. The door closed, and we had the room, our son to ourselves.
He wore a blue cap my mother had knitted and was swaddled in the baby soft blanket we found in a shop in Half Moon Bay. I touched the fabric, brushed my fingers over the sea turtle and starfish design, too afraid to look at his face. I knew he needed more time to grow.
After a while, Reide laid him gently on a pillow by my hip and brought out a camera. How and why he thought of it, I don’t know. Maybe his work as a police officer prepared him; he’s seen the worst, examining accident and drunk-driving sites. Now, I’m grateful, but at the time I cried out, like he was paparazzi harassing our son. I reached over.
Reide pushed the button and captured my hands cradling an impossibly small child in his shroud. I rested our son against my chest and tried to settle down. As Reide composed, framed, and snapped, I braved a glance and saw I’d been right: he wasn’t finished forming. His skin was unnaturally dark and mottled; his left nostril had not yet separated from his upper lip. His eyelids were ice-blue and translucent, eggshells too thin to protect any yolk. His left hand was curled and tucked beneath his chin, while his right arm was fused against his stomach. I didn’t dare look anywhere else and held our son as long as I could bear, terrified I might squeeze too tight, crush a bone, or lose my grip and drop him. Three hours is not so long. Maybe if I’d been given more time, I would’ve looked longer, I would’ve touched more.
What does Reide really think? Does he consider my sorrow genuine, a sham, or both?
* * * *
Sabetha’s high-pitched voice wafts in pieces from the bedroom. She’s singing into the window fan a strident, insistent song. Singing, or is it crying?
* * * *
A week after the surgery, my milk came in. I covered my T-shirt with my hands and hurried to the bathroom before Reide saw the stains. After he’d gone to bed, I got up and plastered cold cabbage leaves against my sore breasts. Other nights, I used bags of frozen peas. For fifteen days, I wore tight bras and turned my back to the spray in the shower. I slept on my side to keep from spotting the sheets. I did everything I could to staunch and endure the flow. Although Reide never asked what was going on, I think he knew. Crying didn’t help. I leaked then too.
* * * *
The screen door squeaks on its track. Sabetha shambles out in a pink ruffled-bottom bathing suit.
“Go on now,” Janet says. “Play with Miss Kate. She’s our company.”
For my benefit, Janet grabs fistfuls of her own hair and scrunches up her face. See what I’m not missing? Ah, the joys of motherhood, right? She grins and returns to her show.
“Ooh, pretty.” I squat down and trace a green polka dot on Sabetha’s tummy. “Are you swimming?”
“Have to wait for Lakin.” She pouts.
In the past, I would’ve replied with some platitude, “He’ll be home soon” or “That sounds fair,” but experience has taught me the limits of my knowledge. Lakin might come home, or he might not. And what, exactly, is fair: that Sabetha swelter for the sake of making her mother’s life more convenient when the pool’s a mere elevator trip away? That Janet expects me to thank her for not flirting with my husband, not kindling an affair? That I mourn a child I did not want, while my husband who wanted does not grieve?
This time I offer something different, what I desire: “How about some magic?”
Sabetha and Snow White nod. I grab my left thumb at the joint and bring my hands together, so the index finger covers the gap. Quickly, deftly, I slide my thumb along the side of my hand. The tip separates from its base. Silly me, I’ve severed my own thumb.
Sabetha stares and goes slack jawed. I restore the body part, magically healing my thumb.
“Do it again,” Sabetha breathes.
The thumb trick does not distract for long. Sabetha plants Snow White inside a wicker basket holding a pot of aphid-infested roses and has the mermaid swim laps around this sickly garden isle. The TV babbles behind us: “You mess around with me, young lady, I’ll wipe the floor with you. We follow each other?”
I stick my pasty inner arms out in front of me, let them bake in the sun. The turquoise water sparkles below, like a Disney-drawn lake.
“Do you remember me, Sabetha?” I say, meaning from months ago. “Do you know who I am?”
The little girl doesn’t answer, too busy whispering secrets to her dolls. Something—a fly, a bee, I think—sails past my ear. Two seconds later, a faint smack sounds below. I peer over the side and spy red polymer hair and a glimmering green tail in the bark mulch inside the pool’s fence: dry-docked.
“Is she swimming?” Sabetha asks. “Let me see. Is she swimming?”
“Almost,” I say. “First, she wants to get a tan.”
Sabetha grabs the edge of the wood rail and hops and squirms until I lift her.
“Where are you?” the little girl shouts.
I point straight down.
Sabetha whimpers, “Ariel?”
I tighten my hold and wonder at the milky smoothness of her skin, her delicate hip bones, the protruding pillow of her stomach. Her body feather-light and energetic as a sparrow.
Sabetha wriggles and shifts for a better view.
“Mermaids dive all the time,” I say, inhaling the talc scent of her nut-brown hair, tracing the contour of her seashell ear. “She’s just resting.”
“She can’t rest,” says Sabetha. “She already had her nap.”
The soles of her feet push against my thighs. A seedling’s roots searching for an anchor in the soil.
“Upsa-daisy,” I croon.
Sabetha lifts her right foot and steps onto the railing. I grasp her wrists, extend her arms.
Suddenly, the little girl tugs her hands free and slips loose, tipping forward like a baby bird testing its wings, ready to plummet from the nest. I snatch at her suit strap and snake my right arm around her knees. She gasps and pitches back, tumbles against my chest. Swinging her onto my hip, I step deep into the shade and await her sobs. My knees are shaking, my heart is pounding, and my spiteful hands now refuse to let go.
“If something doesn’t make sense,” Judge Judy says behind us, “it’s not true.”
“We almost flew like Ariel,” she says. Her eyes are wide, her face ashen. Her body comprehending what her mind cannot.
“Almost, but we didn’t, right?” I stroke her hair and hum, relieved there are no tears.
What, if anything, Janet has seen, I don’t know. The TV continues to drone.
“Let’s be more careful, okay? You’re a girl, not a butterfly, not even a flying squirrel.”
Sabetha cracks a smile. She slants her sweaty forehead against mine and declares not unkindly, “Okay, silly. Silly Kate.”
* * * *
Ten minutes later, Janet shoves her backside against the laundry room door and sets her basket between her feet. She thanks me for the visit. I smile and nod, energized as I transfer my clothes from washers to dryers. Sabetha, God love her, has scurried outside to push the elevator button.
“We should do this again.”
“You’re right,” I say. “Maybe an evening next time with the guys.”
Janet nods and pushes her weight against the spring-controlled door. Something thumps outside.
“Oh, sweetie, wait a minute for Mommy.” Janet sighs. “She’s trying to open the door to the elevator.”
I adjust the heat settings and start the machines.
“Can I tell you something?” Janet says.
Despite the whir of tumbling clothes, she drops her voice to a colluding whisper, reminiscent of undertones exchanged in high school bathrooms, and shuffles closer so that the basket is propping open the door. I rest against a washer and give her my full attention; most likely, she wants to dish on Walter.
“Now don’t take this wrong,” she begins, “but it’s been…reassuring, in a way, to see…I mean, I guess after that one day I wasn’t sure, but now, I know you really did want—and who wouldn’t?” She clasps her hands and shrugs helplessly. “I guess you changed your mind is all?”
Sweat beads at the back of my knees, in the hollow of my throat and trickles down my neck in a salty ooze. My arms cross. My legs stiffen.
“See, I knew,” Janet says, mashing a hand against her heart. “I knew. It always happens. It’s just so natural for us. God knew what He was doing giving you that baby.”
Smiling, she stoops down for her basket. I stamp my flip-flop on the handle first. Janet startles, crooks her head up at me, hair spilling across her ruddy face.
“So then: He knew what He was doing—taking him away?”
Janet gapes. Her eyes well. “I’m a mother,” she says hoarsely. “I know. I’m a mother.”
As her face blotches with tears, small footsteps scamper close. Like Reide, she can imagine but she cannot comprehend.
“You’ve never lost one,” I say icily.
Janet grasps her daughter’s hand and stands slowly. Her eyes flicker from me to Sabetha and back again. I lower my foot to the ground.
That evening, I drop my towel on the cement and plunge feet-first into the pool. Lamplight from doorways above glimmers and scatters as I stroke across the dark water. Four laps later, I lie on my back, arms out, neck long, and drift. Silverware clatters and in the cooling air, the sizzle of grilled steak, the pungent smell of curry. Voices rise and fall, and stars twinkle pinpricks in the gloom.
I’m not proud of what I said to Janet, who has, after all, tried to be my friend.
* * * *
A few weeks from now, Janet and I will run into one another in the carport. She will chatter, make small talk, while I sever my thumb for Sabetha. And then: after she straps her daughter into the van, Janet will sigh and place a hand upon her belly, over the bulge I’ve taken for Mint Milano fat. My hand will move in automatic mimicry, as if her motion is as contagious as a yawn. At the last second, however, unnerved, I’ll stop and fiddle with the button of my jeans instead. Janet will be like the two before her, women I befriended who ultimately departed, squeezed out of their two-bedroom by another mouth to feed.
Unless the unthinkable occurs.
* * * *
In the pool, my feet kick, my hands flutter. They brush a drifting seed pod, then skim across my belly—and farther down. I swim to the stairs in the shallow end. I unhook my top, hang it and my bikini bottom from the metal rail, and paddle out again. Reide is right: the water cools my skin.
Four stories up, a child’s silhouette presses against a window screen, the light behind her forming a halo in my chlorine-stung eyes. A moment later, the room goes dark, and a pair of small pale faces gaze down. I wonder what, if anything, Lakin and Sabetha can see: a woman floating in a shadowy pool, with ribbons of blond rippling round her head, two skin-colored water balloons on her chest, and a thatch of flaxen curls like seaweed between her legs. And, if they peer hard, a rescued toy mermaid, nestled atop a scarlet seven-inch scar stitching forever shut a pleasantly vacant yet desolate womb.
A door slams. Light floods our living room and slips through cracks in the fence between our patio and the pool. Keys drop and scrape on the countertop. I hold my breath. Above, the children giggle and run off, as someone closes their window blinds.
“Kate?” calls Reide. “You home?”
Our screen door slides open, and the latch to our patio door clinks.
I splash over, plop Ariel onto the first stair, and stretch for my suit, then let it fall as Reide opens the gate to the pool. I dart toward the deep end and tread water. He plucks my bikini top out of the shallows.
“Kate?” he says uncertainly.
“Hi.” Slivers of lamplight shimmer on the riffles around me.
Against the dark navy blue of his uniform shirt, his gold badge gleams.
He squats down and peers intently, a smile playing upon his lips. “Would you like some company?”
“Maybe.” I pause my energetic breaststroke kicking and pull my knees high, close to my chest. Feeling more buoyant, I push the water away with my palms, then cup my hands and bring it back against my skin. The constant motion keeps me upright and soothes, as well. “You do seem a bit overdressed,” I add slyly.
Grinning, he stands and unbuttons his short-sleeve shirt. He shrugs it off, then tugs off his undershirt and drapes them both on the fence behind him. As he grasps his belt buckle, he scans the apartment building, but the balconies and windows are empty. Everyone is inside, including the children. He unzips, pulls his legs out, his feet free, then tosses his pants onto the fence and turns back around. Even in the shadows, his body looks sculpted. When he touches the waistband of his boxer shorts, I glance at Janet and Walt’s apartment and hiss, “Don’t!”
He shakes his head. “I was just scratching an itch.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Trust me, I don’t want to have to arrest myself for indecent exposure.”
I glance down at my bare chest. “Are you going to arrest me?” I try to keep my voice light, but a hardness cuts in.
“Of course not.” Hands on his hips, he regards me curiously. “But I may need to issue you a warning, ma’am.”
My arms are getting tired. I paddle to my left until my feet touch the bottom. Standing with his toes over the edge of the pool, Reide bends at the knees and points his hands toward the water, readying for a dive.
“You ate muffins with Janet,” I blurt.
He lowers his arms and stares. “What are you talking about?”
“You and Janet.”
He snorts and traipses along the red tile bordering the pool until he’s across from me again, then sits down and dangles his legs in the water. “So, what did she tell you?”
“Enough,” I say.
“Apparently.” Propping an elbow on one hand, he strokes his chin, as if contemplating my gullibility.
He believes I trust too easily, but I know what I heard. Beneath the surface, I churn my arms, pushing and pulling at the weight of the water. Bitch, bitch, bitch, I think.
Reide sighs. “Kate, she’s your friend. She saw me at her kid’s school and practically begged me to have coffee with her.” He shrugs. “She seemed a bit desperate, and, you know, she can be pretty stubborn.”
My heart eases. My shoulders drop away from my ears. In my chest, a tightness fades, while a taut knot at the back of my head disappears. I smile and still my arms. Reide hops into the water. Slowly, he approaches and grazes my cheek with his fingers.
“Your skin feels cool,” he says. “How are you feeling?”
“Maybe a little less crazy? I don’t know.” I close my eyes and nudge my cheek against his palm. “Do…do you miss him?” I breathe.
“Yes,” he says quietly.
I tilt my head and look up at him. “You never—you don’t ever seem to show it.”
“I’ve been more worried about you.”
The water plashes just above his boxers. I clasp his waist, feeling the wet cotton below and above the slick warmth of his skin. He enfolds me so that my cheek rests against his chest.
“I didn’t know you felt—feel—sad,” I say.
“I guess sometimes,” he replies, his voice suddenly rough, “I don’t know either. But I think maybe it’s hit you harder.”
“Yeah,” I allow. “But even so, I don’t want to be the sad and crazy one all the time.”
“What if we took turns?”
I laugh. “Really? Okay, sure.”
He reaches down and cups my ass. Giggling, I wrap my legs around his waist. Crickets chirp. The pool filter hums. We kiss until our fingers and toes turn pruney, wrinkling like those of a newborn. Our son, a part of Heaven we could not keep, will remain a part of us. Always. Water laps. Star jasmine perfumes the night air. Deeply, we breathe.
Colleen Olle’s prose has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Running Wild Anthology of Stories: Volume 5, and Fault Zone: Reverse. She earned an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars and at the University of Michigan won a Hopwood Award for underclassman essay writing. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her talented husband, co-author of their children’s picture book Sophia and Sinclair Go on an Adventure!
Why we chose this piece: We really connected to Colleen’s voice and style, and we appreciated how she explores so many nuances and perspectives of a difficult subject. She captures Kate’s conflicting emotions extremely well. Also, Janet is a phenomenal antagonist; she is the literal worst. The tension in this piece is so strong that we just had to keep reading. The ending is hard-fought and well-earned.
