Over the years, she’d considered having a baby with any number of people. Marriage was not part of her plan; she wasn’t against it, she just wasn’t for it. She treated her occasional yearning for a baby the same way she treated her occasional yearning for a dog. Let it linger and wait to see if it passed, which it always did, which she took as a good sign. Because other things she desired (her house, a particular author signed, a midcentury table in good condition) didn’t flit through, they planted themselves until she turned desire into ownership. That her fleeting thoughts of motherhood never truly haunted her the way, say, her quest for the magenta peony bushes in her yard did was comforting as she imagined her ovaries surrendering the final vestiges of fertile eggs into the hinterlands of her reproductive system.
THEN THE STORM. The expected-unexpected arrival of Leo. The power outage. Leo. A little too much wine (hers), the familiar mouth (his). Leo had seemed the tiniest bit broken. She made him laugh. They talked. He took her wrists and circled them with his thumb and forefinger, pulling her to him (the way he had that first night their friendship became something else, the night he turned to her in a hidden booth at a small burger joint and said, “I’ve been wondering what you keep beneath your blouse”) and then he’d two-stepped her across her kitchen, in the dark, under the moonlight, and kissed her with such acquisitive purpose, she thought she might combust. Leo. What else was there to do when the lights were out—wind howling, branches splitting and falling—but fuel the fire, let him lift the sweater over her head, unzip her pants, and fuck her silly under the unblinking, marbled gaze of Lillian.
She looked back down at the list she’d written. Her four words. She was going to have to talk to Leo very soon. Whatever he said, whatever his reaction, the decision was hers. This belonged to her. She took the cap off her pen and crossed out single, wrote mother.
It didn’t look terrible.
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
When Matilda was recovering in the hospital and found out how much money she was getting from the Plumb family, she’d had all kinds of fantasies about what to do with it. (Shamefully, she remembered that her first involuntary thought was a pair of suede boots she’d coveted, the ones that went over the knee and stopped midthigh; then she remembered.) She thought about trips and clothes and cars and flat-screen televisions. She thought about buying her sister her own beauty salon, which she’d always wanted. She thought about buying her mother a divorce.
The staff at the rehabilitation hospital tried to prepare her for all her future expenses, not just her prosthetic foot (which would need to be replaced every few years) and its various related medical issues and costs, but the accommodations she’d have to make to her home. “It sounds like your living situation is not ideal,” one of the social workers said to her. “You might need to reassess.” Matilda took the financial worksheets and nodded her head, but she didn’t really listen. Everything seemed so much sunnier at the rehab hospital where she was a little bit of a star, so young and determined and doggedly cheerful. She learned each skill quickly and was able to go home sooner than most patients. When she returned to her parents’ cramped apartment in the Bronx, Matilda started to understand what she was up against.
The problems began at the building’s front door, which opened to three flights of stained, uneven, peeling linoleum stairs that were discouraging in the best of circumstances but were horrific with crutches and wouldn’t be much better once her prosthetic foot was ready. Inside the apartment to the left of the front door was a corridor, too narrow for a wheelchair (which she sometimes needed, especially at night), leading to the apartment’s one bathroom and galley kitchen. Straight ahead, four small steps down, was the sunken living area that thirteen-year-old two-footed Matilda believed was the height of design sophistication and now made amputee Matilda want to weep in frustration.
And there was her mother’s decor, what she and her sister used to call South of the Border kitsch—mismatched throw rugs from Mexico, colorful baskets full of fabric, tiny rickety tables holding religious statuary—all of it now seemed like a concerted effort to kill her. Small things she’d never noticed about the apartment loomed large: The toilet was very low, the shower required stepping over the side of a challengingly deep bathtub, there were no railings—not even a towel bar—for her to grab onto.
Beyond the physical discomfort with the apartment and the utter lack of privacy, which was psychologically draining, there was the emotional stress of being around her two parents. Even though they’d been unusually kind to each other in the wake of the accident, uniting in their worry and grief for the first time in years, they never left her alone. They watched her move around the rooms guardedly, her mother clutching a rosary, her father trying to avert his gaze.
She had to get out of there.
Matilda didn’t believe in God as much as she believed in signs. (She knew she’d gotten a sign the night of the accident in the front seat of Leo Plumb’s Porsche, the setting sun glinting off his wedding ring, and she’d ignored it and now look at her. God had taken her right foot.) She said a rosary every morning when she woke, praying to know what to do, where to live. So when she saw the billboard in front of a brand-new condominium complex on her favorite street, the one lined with cherry trees that bloomed exuberantly in the spring, she knew: The sign was her sign.