“Or talk to her?”
He shook his head. She didn’t ask if he still loved her, because she feared the answer.
“I didn’t come back to see you,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about the nursery and my sister’s house is too small—”
“Of course,” he said. “Let’s do it here. What do you want? I’ll get it.”
She imagined the two of them assembling the nursery piece by piece, the way she and her sister had redecorated the guest room when she first moved in. They’d created the bedroom from Aubrey’s fantasies, a room she had imagined while sleeping on trundles and couches and motel cots, a room she had assembled in her mind when she needed a place to hide. Her mother’s boyfriend touched her and she hung a picture frame, spread a thick quilt on the bed, traced the floral wallpaper with her fingernail.
She and Luke could create a beautiful world for their daughter and she wouldn’t know any different.
“I have to think about it some more,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Think all you want.” He slid his hands in his pockets, taking a tiny step toward her. “Can I—is she kicking yet?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when she kicks.”
She headed to the front door, past the key hook, the coat closet, the side table. Then she paused and grabbed Nadia’s stack of letters. The most recent one had no return address, only the words Please forgive me written on the envelope in smudged blue ink.
—
BY FEBRUARY, Nadia’s father had started taking slow walks around the block in the evening. He wore a navy blue windbreaker zipped up to his neck and she perched on the front steps, watching him make one slow loop and then another. He no longer needed her help, but she still did small things for him, cooking dinner and washing his clothes. Every two weeks, she cut his hair with her mother’s clippers, wondering what her mother would say if she could see them now, if she’d be surprised by how their lives had melded, if she’d foreseen this in the moment she pushed her little girl forward and urged her to kiss her daddy hello. The February bar exam came and went, and Nadia started thinking about July. She could take the California bar, not the Illinois, and move back home for good. Find a job somewhere close, maybe downtown San Diego, only a forty-minute drive away, so she could still take her father to church on Sundays. She could do what every girl in Oceanside did: marry a Marine and dream of nowhere else. What was not to love about this place where there were no winters and no snow? She could find a nice man and live in this eternal summer.
One evening, while she watched her father disappear around the corner, Luke’s truck pulled up in front of the house. Her breath hitched, and she clambered to her feet as he headed up her driveway.
“Hi,” he said. “Can I come in?”
She stepped inside silently, Luke following her. She suddenly felt exposed—she was wearing bunchy sweatpants and a baggy Michigan shirt, her hair pulled into a sloppy bun—and she glanced around the living room, the floor she hadn’t yet swept, her stacks of books on the coffee table. But why did it matter? Those days of impressing him were over, weren’t they? Besides, he knew her. What part of her life was unseen to him? They both paused in the entrance, as if venturing further into the house breached an unspoken agreement. Then she started into the kitchen—a safe room—and he followed her slowly, his hands in his pockets.
“Heard from Aubrey?” he said.
“No,” she said.
“She took your letters.”
“She did?”
“The ones you sent to the house. I don’t know if she read them but she took them.”
For the first time in months, her chest felt lighter. Aubrey might never forgive her, but at least now she might know how sorry Nadia was. She filled a glass with water and handed it to Luke.
“I heard about your baby,” she said. “Congrats.”
He took a long sip before setting the glass on the counter. “My mom?”
“Your mom.”
“It don’t feel real yet,” he said. “I don’t know if every guy feels like that or if it’s just—I mean, she e-mailed me the sonogram. I guess I always thought I’d be in the room to see it.”
Nadia thought of her own sonogram, the faceless splotch against the dark backdrop. She’d never told Luke that she had seen it. It would hurt him, knowing that she’d seen their baby and he hadn’t. He leaned against the wall, sliding his hands back into his pockets.
“I got something to ask you,” he said.
“What?”
“Can you talk to Aubrey?”
“I told you, she won’t talk to me—”
“Maybe it’s different now,” he said. “She took the letters. You can tell her what happened—how you were sad about your dad and how shit just got complicated because of everything that happened before—”
“You want me to take the blame,” she said.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“That’s what you’re fucking saying—”
“I want to see my daughter,” he said. “I want to know her.”
So they were having a girl. In a way, she felt relieved. She’d been hoping their baby would be a girl. Baby was, or had been, a boy, and if this new baby had been a boy too, it would’ve felt like Baby had been not just replaced but overwritten completely. But that was a stupid thought. She had no way of knowing whether Baby was a boy or not, and how dare she care if he’d been replaced, a child she hadn’t even wanted in the first place. Not the way Luke wanted his girl. She could do this for him, take the fall. She imagined herself delivering this version of the story, the version that his mother undoubtedly already believed. That she had seduced Luke, that she had ensnared a good man who was only trying to help her care for her sick father. Would Aubrey believe this? Would any woman truly believe this, besides one who needed to?
“I hope she forgives you,” she said. “I hope you’re there for her. You were never there for me. You left me in that clinic. I had to handle everything on my own—”
“Nadia—”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m not lying for you. I’m not lying to her anymore.”
Luke left quietly. She followed him into the entrance, where her father was standing in the entryway, unzipping his jacket. He frowned as Luke brushed past him.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just Luke Sheppard saying hi.”
—
A CHILDHOOD’S WORTH of terrible Christmas gifts lived in Nadia’s drawers. Her father found them all the afternoon he searched her things. He wasn’t a good gift-giver—his wife had always bested him—but he’d still spent hours every December inside department stores, picking out necklaces with little swirly shapes, charm bracelets, anything covered in pink rhinestones. Pretty, frilly things he thought a girl would want, like pajamas with an actor’s face on them, clunky jewelry, a lavender cell phone case. He found most of these still in her nightstand drawers as he sifted through her things. He liked to think that she kept them because she treasured his gifts, but he knew better. His daughter was not sentimental, not about him. Love was not the same as sentiment. Most likely, she couldn’t be bothered to throw his gifts away. In the bottom of one drawer, he found the gift he’d been most proud of, a ceramic box covered with lavender flowers. It had reminded him of a jewelry box his mother used to own; as a boy, he’d run his fingers over the sculpted flowers, amazed by the types of things women owned, prettiness for pretty’s sake.
He didn’t know what he was looking for. A receipt? A medical document? Some evidence that the clinic he’d overheard her arguing with Luke Sheppard about wasn’t the one downtown. By the time his daughter pulled into the driveway, he had emptied her nightstand drawers, covering her bedspread in metallic wallets, fuzzy socks, sparkly earrings still attached to cardboard. She walked in to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, the ceramic box in his lap. In his hands, he held a golden pair of baby feet.
FOURTEEN