Mara Alvaro crosses her legs at her ankles and sits back in the folding chair on her front porch. Something about this Thursday morning feels off. Nobody was home next door when Blair’s daughter knocked, not even the nanny, and she’s usually there every damn day of the week.
But these mothers are all busy, she knows. Too much going on and yet nothing going on at all, creating urgency where there is none, rushing their lives away. They don’t know how to just be. They make no time to think about what’s right there in front of them.
How fast it can all be taken away.
And she also doesn’t understand why Blair wears those hideous black leggings every day, and Whitney with that dyed yellow hair, wearing those masculine suits and carrying those big ugly bags. Not a feminine thing about them. It’s a shame the way women their age are now.
She thinks about going inside to rinse the crumbs off her breakfast plate. She should clean herself up for the day, too, although that routine has become less effortful in the past few years. The last tube of Avon, the Toasted Rose lipstick she’s worn for decades, ran out nine months ago, and for the first time she hasn’t bothered to replace it.
What does it matter anymore? She’s eighty-two. Unlike her neighbors, she has few friends left around here. Everyone is either dead, or in a nursing home, or one of the lucky ones burdening their children way out in the suburbs. There had been a time when she couldn’t open the front door to get the newspaper without someone stopping to gossip on the porch. Now she’s being swallowed by all the new: the new ugly renovations, the new flashy cars parking on her street, the new young families and all their noises, their stuff, their excess. They want big-city living, they want to feel relevant, but she’s got news for them—they’re all heading in the same damn direction.
She had done her neighborly duty as each of the families had moved in around her. She brought them pastéis de nata and made sure they knew about the garbage pickup schedule. For months, she offered to collect their packages and keep an eye on things if they went away. She offered her advice about their ant-infested peony bush. She dropped off homemade canja in the winter. She didn’t say a thing about the unnecessary third story that now blocked the sun from her small vegetable garden, or the two years of sound pollution she’s lived through given all the self-important renovating they’ve done. And the constant noise of those kids. The hollering about. The slam of that stupid back door.
They had all been kind at first, despite their obvious differences. They seemed interested enough in how long she’d been there, and Oh, you must have seen so much change in the area over the years, like it was a wonderful thing. No acknowledgment that the change was exactly the problem. Every service is empty at St. Helen’s Portuguese Catholic Church on the corner. The remnants of a community painstakingly built by an entire generation of her people were now just eyesores in their neighborhood. They’re waiting to snatch up the few remaining properties owned by old people like her. Salivating for signs of the last import grocers going under. They all want that goddamn mermaid coffee chain within walking distance.
Since those early pleasantries, hardly anybody has asked anything about her. Or her life. Or how she got there. It’s only their children who bother to wave to her. And Rebecca. She likes Rebecca. A doctor doing good, dignified work. Naturally pretty.
So no, there’s no need for doing up her face today or any other day. Instead, she shifts in her chair, listens for the squeak of the canvas beneath her.
“Mara!”
“It’s on the table, Albert!” she shouts back. Like it always is, she wants to add. Every damn morning. Through the screen of the kitchen window behind her, she hears the chair drag across the worn linoleum. She hates watching him eat that sausage, hunched over a greasy plate of food that’s not good for him, not with his heart problems and the high cholesterol.
Instead, she’ll sit in the cool air of the June morning, try to figure out what’s going on.
It’s amazing what you can learn about people when you’re more or less invisible. It’s the things they don’t want you to see that tell you the most.
5
Whitney
The Hospital
The tubes don’t upset her like Rebecca said they would. The IV, the breathing tube, the wires, the tape that pulls angrily at his skin. None of it even registers. There is only a boy. Her boy. His beautiful face, his cheeks that always smell like fresh air. She feels relief when she sees him there. He is in the world. She had pulled away from Rebecca’s hand and swiftly picked up his, and she has not let go, not yet.
The hospital where she gave birth to him ten years ago is ninety-five miles away in a building she hasn’t thought of in a very long time. Had the walls been this color, this same sickly green? And weren’t the curtains this same candy-cane stripe? His birth is a memory she doesn’t reach for much. She doesn’t walk down memory lane with a lump in her throat. She doesn’t make keepsake albums and growth records or save tiny teeth crusted with dried blood. She doesn’t engage in conversations with women topping one another’s labor stories. She has no time for that. She has no time for the kinds of details and measures and particulars that seemed to matter so much to other women.
She isn’t that kind of mother.
Although there is one thing she remembers clearly about Xavier’s birth: he came out of her in three pushes. Three pushes were all it took to separate from each other for the rest of their lives. That thought seems absurd to her now, like she should have every right to put him back inside her with that same amount of effort. Three. Two. One. He is hers. She made him. She grew him and raised him. She is supposed to be able to protect him. And she wants him back inside her. She could do it all over, do it differently. Start from the beginning again.
She traces his name in the fine blond hairs that cover his forearm. The skin on his elbow looks like wax where the latest scrape is healing, for now. He’ll rip it open again in the next few days. There is always some bleeding part that he barely notices himself, and she finds smears of blood on the kitchen table, the bathroom rug.
She runs her finger over his elbow and then the ripped cuticles on his right thumb. It looks red, like he was sucking it. Does he still do that at night? She’ll put lotion on his hands after his shower tonight. She will send Louisa home early and she will take over this time. She will do it all by herself, every night from now on, the stories and the second glass of water and the endless questions, and she will learn how to enjoy that kind of time.
This is how she thinks about things that morning, as though there will be a chance again for him to fall off a scooter, to continue a habit. As though there will be another chance to find patience. And restraint.
Accidents happen. People will say this to her, even though they don’t believe she deserves the compassion. But no, an accident is a glass of spilled milk. The split lip of an adventurous toddler.
Someone asks if she has an update about when her husband might arrive. They think she’s incapable of answering questions, of making decisions as the parental guardian. And perhaps they are right.
Jacob. She will check to see if he’s called again. Her phone seems heavy in her hand. Had it always felt like a brick? There is a text from him. He’s on the standby list at Heathrow. He will come straight to the hospital when he lands.
He’ll be traveling back in time.
She imagines Jacob catching their son as he falls. The weight of him, the grunt of effort as his body lands in the cradle of his arms.
She texts him—go to Sebastian and Thea first, make sure they’re okay with Louisa. He won’t, of course. He will beg for the taxi to drive faster, to run the red lights. But she is not ready to see him. He’ll take one look at her and he’ll know everything. She is sure of it.
She ignores the other barrage of texts and the small red bubble reading “27” on the email icon. The number changes to “28” while she stares at it. She’s missed six calls from her colleagues. The world is waking up, it is motoring with hours that are billable. Meetings that seem important.
Her phone hits the hospital room floor. She leaves it there.
Rebecca appears again at the other side of the bed.
She does not lift her eyes.
What would it be like if I wasn’t here?