Affairs were for boozy, lonely housewives or horny businessmen, real adults doing real adult things, not sneaking her high school boyfriend into her childhood bed. Nadia felt layers of the past peeling away; she was slowly stepping backward into her old life. Luke on top of her, his familiar warmth and weight, every man since him melting away like the springtime fog. He visited each day during his lunch break and she snuck him into her room while her father took his afternoon nap. In her bed, Luke wasn’t married anymore. He didn’t know Aubrey. She was seventeen again and tiptoeing with Luke through her parents’ house, except now they had to be extra quiet, hoping that his cane wouldn’t drum too loudly against the floor.
In her bed, she believed the impossible. She felt herself growing younger, her skin softer and tighter, her mind unfilling with the textbooks she’d read. Luke uncrippled, unswallowing aspirin by the palmfuls. Unloving Aubrey. He kissed Nadia and she felt untouched, their baby unforming inside of her, their lives separating.
She unhinged from time, her days splintering into before and after. Before Luke visited, she cleaned the kitchen, helped her father to the bathroom, gave him his medicine, showered. She combed her hair but never put on makeup—too much effort would ruin the naturalness of their tryst—and helped her father to his armchair. After Luke, she showered again, closing her eyes into the steam, as if the hot water could rinse away what she’d just done.
Some days, they did not have sex. Some days, Luke sat at the kitchen table while she made him a sandwich. She felt him watching her as she cut it in half and imagined that this small moment was normal for them. She slid into the chair across from him and propped a leg onto his lap; he ate and under the table, stroked her calf. Affairs were shadowy and secretive, not lunches shared in a sunbathed kitchen while her father napped in the living room. But these quiet, clothed days felt the most treacherous, the most intimate.
“I love you,” he whispered one afternoon, his fingers stroking her stomach, and she wondered if he was speaking to her at all or the ghost of the child they’d made. Could you ever truly unlove a child, even one you never knew? Or did that love transform into something else? She wished he hadn’t said anything at all; he was tugging at the edges of her fantasy. What was love to her anyway? Her mother had told her she loved her and then she’d left. There was nothing lonelier than the moment you realized someone had abandoned you.
“You left me,” she said. “You left me in that clinic—”
“But I’m here,” he said. “I came back.”
—
THE MORNING OF HER APPOINTMENT, Aubrey sat in the waiting room, watching an overhead television play a video on heart disease. Cartoon red blood cells slid down a chute, ramming into each other like bumper cars. The leading cause of death among women, the video reminded her, as it looped for the third time. Was this cartoon supposed to make you feel better about the fact that your heart might be slowly killing you? She sighed, reaching for a magazine instead. She hated going to the doctor. When she’d first moved to Oceanside, her sister sent her to an endless stream of them. A doctor who gave her a physical where she’d tried not to cry when she unbuttoned her jeans and slipped into the thin paper gown. She felt sick, imagining Paul spreading inside of her like a virus. But there was nothing wrong with her, the doctor had said, and she refused to speak to her sister the whole ride home, ashamed that Mo had thought there might be. Then she’d been sent to a psychiatrist who prescribed her an antidepressant that she never even opened, the orange vial gathering dust in her drawer. A therapist who asked banal questions about school—never Paul—but she’d still felt sick the whole hour, because she knew those questions were lurking. After, she’d climbed into Kasey’s car, resting her head against the window until they made it back home. At night, she’d heard Mo and Kasey arguing in their room, the walls too thin to mask their angry whispers.
“All I’m saying is that she gets so stressed about that doctor—now what?” Kasey had said. “We gonna send her to another doctor for that too?”
A moth fluttered into the waiting room, its brown wings as thin as a scab. She chewed her thumbnail—a nasty habit, her mother had always said—as the moth spiraled through the room, past the receptionist’s desk, the window facing the street, two women sitting under the television, until it drifted onto a stack of magazines. She watched it land, its wings folded like an arrowhead. Her sister had called her earlier and asked for updates when she finished. She’d been trying for months to convince Aubrey to schedule this appointment. Didn’t she want answers? Wouldn’t a diagnosis—even a bad one—be better than wondering why she hadn’t been able to get pregnant? Maybe, but Aubrey hated the idea of waiting for a doctor to tell her what was wrong with her body. She’d made the appointment anyway, which told her one thing: she was beginning to feel desperate.
In Dr. Toby’s office, Aubrey lay on her back, staring up into Denzel Washington’s eyes. Her doctor had tacked posters of handsome movie stars on the ceiling. “It helps my patients relax,” he’d said during her first visit, offering her a wry smile. She clenched her fists as soon as the doctor’s cold tools entered her. She still tensed up when anything was inside her, even Luke’s finger. On their wedding night, she’d hurt so bad, she felt tears gather at the corner of her eyes. But she hadn’t said anything and Luke kept pushing into her, slowly and insistently. How could he not tell that he was hurting her? Or worse, how could he not care? If he loved her, how could he enjoy something that caused her pain? But she soldiered through because this was what you were supposed to do. A girl’s first time was supposed to hurt. Suffering pain is what made you a woman. Most of the milestones in a woman’s life were accompanied by pain, like her first time having sex or birthing a child. For men, it was all orgasms and champagne.
She hadn’t expected that her second time would hurt too, or her third, or even now, years later, that she would still dread the moment when Luke first entered her. He enjoyed it—she could tell from the way he closed his eyes or bit his lip—but she always clenched her fists until she grew used to him moving inside of her. It might be psychological, she’d read online. She felt disgusted at the idea of Paul still lingering in the back of her mind, as if when Luke touched her, Paul watched from the foot of the bed. Or maybe her troubles had nothing to do with Paul at all. Maybe she just wasn’t turned on enough. The website said that women should verbalize their desires, but what were you supposed to say? Were you supposed to sound breathy and baby-like, the way sexy women spoke in the movies? Or crass and vulgar. Did men actually like that in bed? Once, Luke had told her that he wished she would initiate sex more.
“I feel like you don’t really want me,” he said.
She was stunned. Of course she wanted him, he was the only one she’d ever wanted. But she didn’t know how to make him feel that way. She pulled out the teddies and nightgowns she’d been given at her bridal shower, examining them a moment before burying them back in her drawer. She bought whipped cream and chocolate syrup once, but could never figure out how to make the smooth transition from the bed to the refrigerator, so she brought them to Kasey’s birthday party to eat with the cake and ice cream. Maybe nothing was wrong with her body. Maybe she was just bad at sex or her husband was bored. Maybe if she was sexier, more enticing, she would be pregnant already.
Dr. Toby told her not to worry.
“Everything looks fine,” he said. “You’re both young and healthy. Just relax. Have some wine.”
Have some wine, as if that was all it would take. Dr. Toby had spent years in medical school just to arrive at that recommendation? She drove to Mrs. Sheppard’s office, furious at the doctor for wasting her time, but Mrs. Sheppard told her to cheer up. After all, the doctor could have given her a bad report. He could’ve told her she was hopelessly barren, that there was no chance she would ever give birth. Instead, he’d told her that she was healthy. Her mother-in-law reached across the table and squeezed her hand.