“Come here,” Michael says. His blood thuds thickly under my ear, the skin of his arm like tepid water. The road winds through fields and wood, all the way south to the Gulf, and the light that cuts through the windows flutters all around. Where the road meets the Gulf, it skirts the beach for miles. I wish it ran straight over the water, like the pictures of the bridge I’ve seen that links the Florida Keys to the coast, wish it was an endless concrete plank that ran out over the stormy blue water of the world to circle the globe, so I could lie like this forever, feeling the fine hair on his arm, my kids silenced, not even there, his fingers on my arm drawing circles and lines that I decipher, him writing his name on me, claiming me. The world is a tangle of jewels and gold spinning and throwing off sparks. I’m already home.
I’ve never had enough of this. After Michael and I got together in high school, I got pregnant with Jojo in just under a year: I was seventeen. Ever since then we had Jojo and Michaela around us, making those spaces bigger between us. I remember it in flashes, mostly when I’m high, that feeling of it just being me and Michael, together: the way I swam up and surfaced out my grief when I was with him, how everything seemed so much more alive with him. We parked out in a field under the stars, in his pickup truck. We’d sneak and swim in his parents’ aboveground pool, sinking under the water in the blurry blue and kissing. On the beach near a seafood festival, with the lights from the carnival rides flickering in the distance, bad zydeco music sounding over the loudspeakers, he’d twirl me and make me dance with him until we tripped and fell in the sand.
“It ain’t healthy,” Mama said after I brought Michael home the first time, and we sat on the sofa and watched TV. Pop walked through the house and looked past us. After Michael left, Mama began cooking. I sat at the kitchen table and polished my nails, a soft pastel pink, the color of cotton candy, because I thought it looked good on my hand. I hoped the color would make Michael take my fingers in his mouth and say: I gotta get me some of this sweet.
“All you hear, all you see, is him,” Mama said.
“I see plenty else,” I said. I wanted to defend myself, but I knew I was lying, because when I woke up in the morning, I thought of Michael’s laugh, of the way he flipped his cigarettes before he lit them, of the way his mouth tasted when he kissed me. And then I remembered Given. And the guilt I felt when I realized it.
“Every time you say something, you look at him like a little puppy dog. Like you waiting for him to pet you.”
“Mama, I know I ain’t a puppy.”
“You exactly that.”
I blew on the fingers of my right hand and waved them in front of my face, breathed in the hot smells of the kitchen: beans bubbling on the stove, corn bread cooling, the smell of the nail polish, which made my stomach turn, but in a way that I liked. I’d huffed before I got pregnant with Jojo, on my knees in a shed in one of Michael’s friends’ yards, one of the many friends that Michael had whose parents were never home. The world had tilted and spun, and my brain had seemed to break out of my skull and float off. Michael had grabbed my shoulders, anchored me, pulled me back into myself.
“So you don’t like him?” I asked.
Mama breathed out hard and sat across from me at the wooden table. She grabbed my unpolished hand and turned it palm up and tapped it as she spoke.
“I . . . it ain’t his fault what he was born to. Where.” Mama took a deep breath. “Into that family.” She took another hitching breath, and the way her face folded and smoothed, I knew she was thinking of Given. “He just a boy, a boy like any other his age. Smelling his piss for the first time and thinking with his nether-head.” Like your brother, she didn’t say. But I knew the sentence was in her.
“I ain’t doing nothing crazy.”
“If you ain’t already having sex with him, you will be soon. Protect yourself.” She was right, but I didn’t listen. Ten months later, I was pregnant. After Michael got the test and I took it, I brought it to Mama and told her. I told her on a Saturday because Pop worked on Saturdays, and I didn’t want him to be there. It was an awful day. It was early spring, and the rain had been booming all night and all morning: sometimes the thunder was so close, it made my throat judder, closed my windpipe, made it hard for me to breathe. I’d always been scared of lightning, always thought it would hit me one day, burn through the air and touch me with a great blue arc, like a spear streaming straight for me, and me helpless when the sharp head sank in. I’d grown up paranoid, thought the lightning followed me when I was in my car, when it rattled my windows. Mama was hanging plants to dry in the living room on string that Pop had hung on a zigzag back and forth across the room, so the plants listed in the electric air, and Mama half laughing and muttering, the soft backs of her arms flashing white and then not: a kitten showing its belly.
“Here he come. Been singing for weeks.”
“Mama?”
She stepped down from the pine step stool Pop had built her. He’d carved her name into the top of it; the letters looked like wisps of smoke. Philomène. It had been her Mother’s Day present years before, when I was so little the only help I could give was to scratch a little star, four lines crossed at the middle, on the side of her name, and Given had carved a rose that looked like a muddy puddle, now worn smooth by Mama’s feet.
“I was wondering how long it was going to take you to build up the nerve to tell me,” she said, the stool tucked under her arm like she would put it away, but instead of walking to the kitchen, she sat on the sofa and let the step stool hang over her legs across her lap.
“Ma’am?” I asked. Thunder boomed. I felt hot around the neck and armpits, like someone had splashed hot grease across my face and chest. I sat down.
“You’re pregnant,” Mama said. “I saw two weeks ago.”
She reached across the wood in her lap and touched me then, not with the pitiless hand of the lightning, but with her dry, warm hands, soft under the skin she’d worked hard, just a second of a touch on my shoulder, like she had found a piece of lint there and was brushing it off. I surprised myself and curled in to it, leaning forward, put my head on the wood while her hand rubbed circles on my back. I was crying.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The wood hard against my mouth. Unyielding. Wetting with my tears. Mama leaned over me.
“No room for sorries now, baby.” She grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me up to look at my face. “What you want to do?”