“What do you think my mom would say?” I ask. I never bring my mother up with Natasha. Somewhere along the way I learned that all the mothers had to exist in different, separate spheres. That I, too, had to be chopped up—different bits of me reserved for different people.
I thought having a person would stitch me up. Make me whole. Fix me. The way Arizona used to make me feel—like I belonged to something solid even if I was in pieces. It hasn’t been working.
I catch sight of myself in Natasha’s mirror and leap at the unfamiliar image. Smudged makeup under my eyes and a scab on my eyebrow and the metal ring pinching the skin and my hair the tiredest, saddest, least pink shade of pink.
“I wish I could tell you what your mother would say,” Natasha says. “Or I wish you didn’t need to know.”
Victoria and Veronica call out for her from their cribs, and she holds up a finger to tell me she’ll be back in a minute.
I sneak out while she’s in the other room. Some dark and hidden part of me doesn’t want to be face-to-face with the things other girls get but I don’t. I can’t see her be a mother. I don’t want to know what that looks like and continue having to live without it.
I don’t want to live without it.
The walk home is long, that truth finally unlocked and unrelenting.
forty-three
We don’t get to tell my family.
When I get home, Karissa has made a feast of fried baked goods and my father, Arizona, and Roxanne are at the counter with coffees and grimaces.
Bernardo is miserable against the stove. He doesn’t have coffee but looks like he needs it.
“She came into the room,” he says.
“Bernardo slept over,” I say. We were going to tell them that anyway, so it doesn’t matter, and I don’t know what the tortured look on his face means.
“I saw the note you left for him,” Karissa says. “So I told them everything.”
She does not mean she told them everything. She means she told them everything about me.
“I was at Natasha’s,” I say, even though it is now a thing everyone knows.
“I told them that. And I told them about you and Bernardo,” Karissa says. “We’re family. We shouldn’t have secrets.”
Her words pummel me. She doesn’t even blink with shame over how insane that statement is coming from her mouth. Instead her voice is cool and strong. She should be hungover, like us, but she’s not. Or else her coffee is magical.
“This isn’t true, right?” Arizona says.
“I’m hungover,” I say. “Sorry, Dad. Can I eat like seven of those things? And I’m sorry about the sleepover. I know. I get it. I’m rebelling or whatever, I guess.”
“I mean, Natasha? Natasha’s the fucking worst,” Arizona says.
“I should go home,” Roxanne says. She can’t stop fidgeting on the stool.
“Stay. I thought you should be here to hear about Montana’s engagement,” Karissa says. It’s hard to decipher exactly what the look on her face is. She seems proud of herself, kind of sarcastic. Then I realize what it is: smug. She’s smug.
“Montana is not engaged,” Dad says. Arizona nods. She is red-eyed, and her face has that post-crying droop to it. Like it’s worn itself out with too much emotion.
I keep eye contact with Bernardo and hope that he somehow saves me from having to do this here and now and in this way. The things that were beautiful about our love are breaking, and it hurts. I want to take the perfect parts that are still left and bury them in the backyard so no one else can get them.
“Let me see your hand,” Dad says.
“No,” I say. I’m remembering we live in New York and don’t have a backyard. I have nowhere to bury all the good things. They’re going to be taken from me.
“Who are you?” Arizona says. She looks like she might punch me. Her shoulders are back and her hands are up.
“Who is Karissa?” I say. “Did she tell you about herself? About her lies?”
“Come on now, Montana,” Dad says, and of course I’m the one who sounds crazy. Karissa threw me under the bus first, so that anything I say is now suspect. Desperate.
Karissa serves me a whole bunch of French toast pastries. They are too eggy, and she puts too much syrup on them, and she’s wearing one of my father’s crisp white work shirts, and I hate her more than I’ve ever hated any of them because she lied the most. She glares at me.
“Everything Karissa’s told you about herself is a total lie,” I say.
“We’re talking about you right now, Montana,” Dad says. He’s stern and fatherly. He thinks I am insane. Especially in last night’s clothes with last night’s smells and today’s headache.
“Okay, well, we don’t need to talk about me. I can do what I want,” I say. I sound about ten. It’s awful. And Bernardo looks mad too, like I’m supposed to jump up and down and stand up for our love in the face of all this judgment and all these pastries. “It’s not even the issue. The issue is Karissa. She’s why we’re leaving!”
“She’s not why we’re leaving,” Bernardo says in his small, hurt voice.