“Can I come in a second?”
Aubrey hesitated. For a long moment, Nadia thought she would say no, then she stepped aside and Nadia entered the little white house that had once been her home, past the cardboard boxes scattered on the floor, into the kitchen where a sonogram hung on the refrigerator. She leaned closer. There she was, a baby girl. Twenty weeks old and healthy, ten fingers, ten toes. At twenty weeks, a baby looked human.
“My dad found out,” Nadia said. “About my abortion.”
“Oh.” Aubrey’s voice was soft. “Is he mad?”
Nadia shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about her father, not now. She turned back to the sonogram on the refrigerator, imagining herself in the room, holding Aubrey’s hand as the doctor slid the wand on her stomach. The doctor would laugh when he squeezed into the crowded room—he usually didn’t see patients bring in their entire families. No one would correct him that Nadia wasn’t family. She’d join the circle forming around Aubrey—Monique holding her other hand, Kasey touching her shoulders—as all four women watched the baby appear, backlit and washed in white light. Could she feel their awe while they watched her on the screen? Could she feel that she was already encased in love? Or could a baby sense when he was not wanted?
“What does it feel like?” Nadia asked. “Being pregnant.”
“It’s strange,” Aubrey said. “Your body isn’t yours anymore. Strangers will just touch your stomach and ask how far along you are. What makes them think they can do that? But you’re not just you anymore. And sometimes it’s scary because I’ll never be just me again. And sometimes it’s nice because I’ll be more than that.” She leaned against the wall. “But other times I think, what happens if I don’t love this baby?”
“Of course you will. How could you not?”
“I don’t know. That’s what happened to us, right?”
Sometimes Nadia wished that were true. It’d be much simpler to accept that she had been unloved. It’d be much simpler to hate her mother for leaving her. But then she remembered her mother offering her seashells at the beach and sitting up with her all night when she was sick, pressing a hand against her hot forehead and then kissing her, as if that kiss could detect fever better than a thermometer. Nothing about her mother had ever been simple—her life or her death—and her memory wouldn’t be either.
“Maybe they did,” Nadia said. “At least the best they could.”
“Then that’s even scarier,” Aubrey said.
She hugged her stomach. Inside of her was a whole new person, which was as miraculous as it was terrifying. Who would you be when you weren’t just you anymore?
“Do you have a name for her yet?” Nadia asked.
Aubrey paused, then shook her head. She was lying. She had probably thought up lists of names since the baby was just a prayer. But she didn’t want to tell Nadia and Nadia had no right to know. Still, after she hugged Aubrey good-bye, after she climbed back in the cab, after she leaned against the airplane window and watched San Diego shrink beneath her, she imagined herself in the hospital one morning after she received the call. She would pace outside the nursery, looking past the rows of newborns in pink and blue beanies, until she found her. She would know her by sight, the swirling light wrapped in a pink blanket, a child sown from two people she would always love. She would know the baby she will never know.
—
IN THE BEGINNING, there was the word, and the word brought about the end.
The news spread in only two days, thanks to Betty. She would later tell us that she had not meant to cause any harm. Yes, she had leaked personal, private information but that was only because she hadn’t realized it was so personal and private. She had just been going about her business one morning, unlocking the doors around the church, when she’d heard loud voices in the pastor’s office. Of course she’d gone to check on what was happening. Wasn’t that her duty? What if the pastor had needed help? Crazier things had happened. She’d read in USA Today about a minister in Tennessee who had been stabbed by a crazy congregant. And she’d seen a segment on 60 Minutes about a church in Cleveland that had been robbed by a few hoodlums who had suspiciously known exactly where the tithes were kept. When we asked what exactly she aimed to do if the pastor had, in fact, been held at knifepoint in his office, she had dismissed us with a wave and insisted we let her return to her story. So she had gone to investigate the loud voices, and when she’d drawn near, she had peeked around the corner through the crack in the pastor’s door and guess who she’d seen inside?
“Robert Turner,” she whispered across the bingo table. “Yellin’ and carryin’ on. He called Pastor an S.O.B.—can you believe it?”
Of course we couldn’t, which was why Betty looked so delighted to tell us. We could hardly imagine Robert even getting angry, let alone swearing at the pastor in his own office.
“For what?” Hattie asked.
“I don’t know,” Betty said, but her slow smile told us she had a good idea. “But his daughter was there and Robert kept saying ‘she was just a girl’ and the pastor said he was just helping the girl but Robert said she’s his child, it’s no one’s place to be helping her with nothin’.” She paused. “Y’all know what I think? I think there were a baby and now there ain’t one.”
We were disgusted but not shocked. You read about it in the papers every day, girls getting rid of their babies. Weren’t nothing new about it. When we were coming up, we all had a girlfriend or a cousin or a sister who had been sent off to live with an aunty when her shamed mother learned that she was in a family way. Some of our own mothers had taken these girls in and we’d peeped them changing through cracks in the door. We’d seen pregnant women before but pregnancy worn on a girl’s body was different, the globe of a belly hanging over cotton panties embroidered with tiny pink bows. For years, we’d flinched when boys touched us, afraid that even a hand on our thigh would invite that thing upon us. But if we had become sent-off girls, we would have borne it like they did, returning home mothers. The white girls ended up in trouble as often as us colored girls. But at least we had the decency to keep our troubles.
“Y’all think—”
“Of course.”
“Lord have mercy.”
“Y’all think Latrice know?”