In the early morning, Upper Room was cloaked in quiet, which Nadia knew, because years ago, she’d spent a summer of mornings there. In those days, when she was seventeen and wounded and desperate to prove herself worthy of anyone’s attention, she had traveled the silent hallways alone, carrying a mug of coffee from the pastor’s office to the first lady’s. She’d made that journey each morning, and when she’d poured the steaming cup under Mother Betty’s watchful eye, she’d glanced at the pastor’s closed door and wondered what he was doing inside. His work seemed mysterious, unlike his wife’s, which was industrious and practical. Sometimes he’d entered the office after she had, smiling at her as he bustled past, a thick Bible under his arm. Other times he was on the phone when she walked in, his back turned although she could see his hands playing with the curly cord. Once, she’d watched him guide a couple into his office for counseling and she imagined how the pastor might conduct a session. How he would lean back in his creaking leather chair at strategic moments—away when he made a point, toward them when they spoke—how he would seem wise and understanding. That summer, she’d wondered about the types of people who arranged to see the pastor early in the morning. These were the most damaged people, probably, the ones who needed the most help, the ones most worried about what might happen if anyone else in the congregation discovered their problems. She’d never imagined that years later, she and her father would be two of those people, arriving at the pastor’s office as the sun lightened the sky.
The pastor jolted when they walked in. He’d been sitting behind his desk, bent over an open Bible and stacks of legal pads, writing a sermon, probably, which made arriving at his office unannounced seem even more wrong. But her father had walked into her room that morning and said, “We’re going to see the pastor,” with such firmness, she couldn’t contradict him. She’d spent a long, sleepless night, picturing her father sitting on her bed, surrounded by her emptied drawers, holding the baby feet. His eyes had shimmered with tears.
“You went through my stuff?” she’d said, weakly.
“You did this thing?” he said. “You did this thing behind my back?”
He’d refused to name her sin, which shamed her even more. So she’d told him the truth. How she’d secretly dated Luke, and discovered that she was pregnant, and how the Sheppards had given her the money for the abortion. Her father had listened silently, head bowed, wringing his hands, and when she finished, he sat there a moment longer before standing up and walking out of her room. He was in shock, and she didn’t understand why. Didn’t he know by now that you could never truly know another person? Hadn’t her mother taught them both that? Now she and her father stood in the pastor’s doorway and the pastor gazed up at both of them. Then he cleared his throat, gesturing to the burgundy chairs across from his desk.
“Why don’t you two sit down?” he said calmly.
“No,” her father said. “You don’t give me orders. She was just a girl, you son of a bitch, and you knew what your boy had done to her—”
“It was handled, Robert—”
“Handled how? Handled by you? You the one who made her do this? Or your boy?”
“Let’s just talk about this now,” the pastor said, easing out of his chair. “Anger won’t solve anything—”
“Damn right I’m angry! You wouldn’t be angry, Pastor? If this was your girl?”
Her father wanted someone to blame, and how easy it would be to give this to him. She could be the innocent girl, bullied into that unnatural surgery by a selfish boy and his hypocritical father. Across the desk, the pastor rubbed his eyes, like he was suddenly fatigued by the truth.
“I knew,” he said. “I knew that we shouldn’t have given you that money. It’s arrogant. Interfering with a life the Lord has already created.”
“No,” she said. “No one made me do anything. I couldn’t—I didn’t want a baby.”
“So you kill it?” her father said.
He was disgusted with her, which was worse than his anger. After all, hadn’t he and her mother not been ready to be parents? And hadn’t they raised her anyway? What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she have been stronger?
“No one made me do anything,” she said again. Her mother was dead now, long gone, but she might have been proud to know that her daughter did not blame anyone for her choices. She was that strong, at least.
—
ON HER LAST NIGHT in California, Nadia asked the cabdriver to stop at Monique and Kasey’s house on the way to the airport. She sat at the curb for five minutes, watching the meter tick up, until the husky Filipino driver rolled down the window to light a cigarette.
“You going in or . . .” he said.
“Give me a minute,” she said.
He shrugged and tapped his ashes outside the window. She leaned against the glass, watching the smoke lick and curl. Her father had stood in the doorway of her bedroom, watching her pack her suitcase. “You don’t have to go,” he’d kept saying, out of a desire for her to stay or just politeness, she couldn’t tell. He would be settling into his armchair right now, growing re-accustomed to the silence. He might turn on the television to fill the home with sound. Maybe he missed how simple his life had been without her, all his easy routines. He would have to find a new church now—he hadn’t even looked the pastor in the eye when they’d left his office—but what other church would have a need for a lonely man and his truck? She imagined her father traveling from church to church, forever carting someone else’s load, keeping nothing for himself.
She finally climbed out of the cab and rang the doorbell. After the second ring, Aubrey cracked open the door. Her stomach curved like a beach ball over her maternity pants. She was pregnant in a way that Nadia had once feared; in the days following her pregnancy test, she’d lifted her shirt in front of the mirror and stared at a flat stomach that ballooned in front of her eyes until it hung immovably over her jeans. When she’d called to make her appointment at the clinic, the man who answered the phone told her that before he could finalize the date, she had to listen to a recording explaining her other options. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, “it’s just something the clinic is required to do.” He did sound genuinely sorry, and when she’d fallen silent on the other end, he told her that he had no way of knowing whether she actually listened to the whole thing. So as soon as the recording started, she’d quietly set her phone on her desk. She didn’t need to listen to know that she didn’t want to be heavy with another person’s life.
But Aubrey didn’t look scared. She seemed comfortable in her big sweater, a hand resting on her stomach, as if to remind herself that it was still there. She wanted this baby and that was the difference: magic you wanted was a miracle, magic you didn’t want was a haunting.
“Congratulations,” Nadia said.
She tried to smile—this was the hardest part, wasn’t it? When the ease of friendship began to instead require drudging effort. When you stood on the welcome mat instead of trouncing right through the door. She searched Aubrey’s face, for kindness or for anger, but found neither, only a quiet steadiness as Aubrey glanced down, wrapping her sweater tighter around herself.
“You lied to me,” she said.
“I know.”
“For years. You both did.”
“And I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know how to—”
“Is that your cab?”
She felt Aubrey gaze past her shoulder to the cabdriver smoking at the curb. “I’m flying back tonight,” she said.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“So that’s your plan. You do this to me and now you’re just gonna leave.”