“What you mean?” The closest abortion clinic was in New Orleans. One of the more well-off girls in my school whose daddy was a lawyer had taken her after she’d gotten pregnant, so I knew it was there, and it was expensive. I thought we had no money for that. I was right. Mama gestured at the hanging plants, the listing jungle above our heads bristling in the cool electric air.
“I could give you something.” She let the end of the sentence trail off, disappear. She looked at me like I was a smudged book she was having trouble reading and cleared her throat. “It was one of the first things I learned how to do, in my training. It’s the one tea I never have enough of.” She touched my knee then; she’d found another piece of lint. She leaned back again, and her culottes stretched tight across her knees. Years later, that’s where she’d first start feeling the pain from the cancer: in her knees. Then it moved up to her hips, her waist, her spine, to her skull. It was a snake slithering along her bones. Sometimes I think back to that day, to her sitting on the sofa, giving me those little touches, little touches that didn’t want to turn me one way or the other, even though she wanted Jojo, I think, because her grief for Given was hungry for life. Sometimes I wonder if the cancer was sitting there with us in that moment, too, if it was another egg, a yellow egg knit of sorrow, bearing the shape of bullet holes, wiggling in the marrow of her bones. That day, she was wearing a blouse she’d sewn herself from a print full of pale yellow flowers. Roses, looked like. “You want this baby, Leonie?”
A whip-crack of lightning lit the house, and I jumped as the thunder boomed.
I choked and coughed; Mama patted my back. The humidity made her hair alive around her face, tendrils of it standing up and curling away from her buttery scalp. The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I’d seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That’s not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That’s how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.
“Yeah, Mama,” I said. It still twists something in me to think of that: the fact that I hesitated, that I looked at my mama’s face in that light and felt myself wrestle with wanting to be a mother, with wanting to bear a baby into the world, to carry it throughout life. The way we were sitting on that sofa, knees tight, backs curved, heads low, made me think of mirrors and of how I’d wanted to be a different kind of woman, how I’d wanted to move somewhere far away, go west to California, probably, with Michael. He talked about moving west and working as a welder all the time. A baby would make that harder. Mama looked at me and she wasn’t stone no more: her eyes were crumpled and her mouth crooked, and that told me she knew exactly what I was thinking, and I worried that she could read minds, too, that she would see me shying away from who she was. But then I thought of Michael, of how happy he would be, of how I would have a piece of him with me always, and that unease melted like lard in a cast-iron pot. “I do.”
“I wish you would have finished school first,” Mama said. Another piece of lint, this time on my hair at the crown of my head. “But this is now, and we do what we do.” She smiled then: a thin line, no teeth, and I leaned forward and put my head in her lap again, and she ran her hands up and down my spine, over my shoulder blades, pressed in on the base of my neck. All the while shushing like a stream, like she’d taken all the water pouring on the outside world into her, and she was sending it out in a trickle to soothe me. Je suis la fille de l’océan, la fille des ondes, la fille de l’écume, Mama muttered, and I knew. I knew she was calling on Our Lady of Regla. On the Star of the Sea. That she was invoking Yemayá, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with her shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.
*
I’m asleep and I don’t know it until Michael is shaking me awake, his fingers digging into my shoulder. My mouth is so dry, my lips are sealed shut.
“The police,” Michael says. The road behind us is empty, but the tension in his hand and the way his eyes widen and roll make me know this is serious. Even though I can’t see them and don’t hear any sirens, they are there.
“You don’t have a license,” I say.
“We have to switch,” he says. “Grab the wheel.”
I grab it and push my feet into the floorboards and raise my rear off the seat so he can put a leg over in the passenger seat and begin sliding over. He takes his foot off the gas, and the car begins to slow. I put my left foot over near the pedal, and I am sitting in his lap in the middle of the car for one awful, hilarious moment.
“Shit shit shit.” He laughs. It’s what he does when he’s frightened. When I went into labor, my water breaking in the snack aisle of a convenience store in St. Germaine, he scooped me up in his arms and carried me to his truck, laughing while cussing. He told me that once, when he was a boy, a cow kicked one of his friends in the middle of the night when they were out cow-tipping with flashlights: his friend, a redhead with pencil arms and a mouthful of rotten teeth from years of not brushing and chewing dip, braced himself as he fell, and his arm snapped like a tree limb. The elbow bent wrong, a piece of bone sticking out of his upper arm, pearly as a jagged oyster shell. Michael said his own laughter scared even him, then: high and breathless as a young girl’s. Michael lifts me off his lap, slides into the passenger seat, and I am behind the wheel when I see the lights behind me coming up fast on this two-lane highway, flashing blue, siren stuttering.
“You got it?” I ask.
“What?”
“The shit. You know, the stuff from Al.”
“Fuck!” Michael fumbles in his pockets.
“What?” Misty wakes up in the backseat, twisting to look back. I begin slowing down. “Oh, shit,” she says when she sees the lights.
I look in the rearview and Jojo is looking straight at me. He’s all Pop: upside-down mouth, hawk nose, steady eyes, the set of his shoulders as Michaela wakes up crying.
“I don’t have time,” Michael says. He’s fumbling for the carpet, about to shove the plastic baggie out of the little door in the floor of the car, but there’s too much in the way with a balled-up shirt I bought for him in a convenience store when we stopped to get gas, with plastic bags of potato chips and Dr Pepper and candy we bought with the money Al gave us. “And it got a fucking hole in it.” The bottom of the plastic baggie is scored and jagged, the white and yellow crystal dry and crumbly at the corners.
I snatch the small white baggie. I shove it in my mouth. I work up some spit, and I swallow.
*
The officer is young, young as me, young as Michael. He’s skinny and his hat seems too big for him, and when he leans into the car, I can see where his gel has dried and started flaking up along his hairline. He speaks, and his breath smells like cinnamon mints.