“Listen,” Seth, my head engineer, says, flicking a switch on the e-bike. He had the model covered in a beige tarp when the board first walked in, allowing him the opportunity to rip it off as though we were at a magic show. He even said ta-da! Despite how mad I am at Kelly—for meeting up with Jen behind my back, for getting herself invited to Lauren’s party, for that fucking braid—we exchanged a look. Seth is the nicest and most annoying person we know.
All kidding aside, my new bike does deserve an unveiling, a middle-aged man’s dorky ta-da! Bloody gorgeous, our London guy said. I’d quite like one for myself. And everyone had laughed, because picturing stiff John Tellmun riding around Notting Hill Gate on this glossy red cruiser with the blush leather seat and plump pink handlebars is pure comedy gold.
“I don’t hear anything,” Layla says, her ear aimed at the ground. Girls as young as nine will be riding these bikes, so Kelly thought it would be a nice touch for the board to see that a twelve-year-old can easily and safely operate the machinery.
Seth points his finger at Layla, ding-ding-dinging. “The little lady wins a 2016 Toyota Camry!” Layla looks confused, and Seth clears his throat, embarrassed the joke didn’t land. “The electronic models sound like they are off even when they’re on, so always make sure that you check the switch before you get on, okay, Layla?”
Kelly reaches up to tighten the chinstrap on Layla’s helmet. Layla shot past me this year, which is not anything to write home about, but she’s almost the same height as Kelly, who has a few inches on me. I don’t remember Fad being especially tall, but maybe he had tall parents, tall sisters. We will never know.
“Mom,” Layla groans, but she lifts her chin and lets Kelly fuss with the strap.
Sharon makes a sound that expresses how precious she thinks this is: Kelly’s braid, Kelly’s overprotectiveness, Layla’s indulging of Kelly’s overprotectiveness, all of it. Like Kelly, Sharon has a preteen daughter. Unlike Kelly, Sharon is practically fifty.
Layla swings her leg over the pink seat.
“Look at those stems,” Sharon says, lowly, to Kelly, and Kelly beams. “And that skin. Like a latte. She could be in Vogue.”
Kelly’s smile fails like an old engine. “Not too fast!” she warns Layla.
“It goes, like, forty miles an hour.” Layla directs her eye roll at me, the only other person in the room who could possibly comprehend the extent of Kelly’s lameness.
“You kill someone if you hit them at forty miles an hour,” Kelly says, matching Layla’s sulky tone to make her point that this is nothing to be flip about.
We watch Layla pedal the SPOKElectric prototype deeper into the warehouse, the bike emitting a mild hum that’s amplified by the concrete floors. I could crawl faster.
“Mine would have torn out the door going as fast as she could just to spite me,” Sharon says to Kelly. “Top-notch mothering, honey.” I used to think it was such a throwaway, whenever someone complimented a woman on her mothering skills. I didn’t think it took talent to be a good mother—just don’t beat them and take them to the dentist occasionally, and voilà!, you’re a good mother. Loving them doesn’t even take much work. Even the moms who beat their kids love them. Then Kelly had Layla, and I realized just how mistaken I was. Because Kelly’s mothering skills were shaky at best that first year with Layla, neglectful at worst.
Do you know my father made two appointments for Kelly to skulk past the four angry men pumping posters of mutilated fetuses into the air at Kelly’s behest? I flexed my biceps and spoke like Tony Soprano on our way out the door, both times, offering my services as bodyguard. I was trying to get her to laugh. Really, I just didn’t know how to appropriately express to Kelly that it wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t the end of the world that she went a little nuts out from under Mom’s watchful eye and it wasn’t the end of the world that she hadn’t had responsible sex and it wasn’t the end of the world to undergo a safe, legal medical procedure that has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years in every sort of society imaginable.
I wanted Kelly to laugh, but I also wanted her to go. Mom had just died, and although our relationship had been complicated, she was still my mom, and I still loved her. Our lives were in turmoil, and on some level, I believed that if Kelly could just go back to school, graduate, and became a radiologist like our mother had always planned, things would go back to normal too. Normalish. Never mind that normalish wasn’t in my best interests, because normalish meant Kelly was the successful one, the pretty one, the star. But it was what was comfortable, and we’re always drawn to what’s comfortable, even when it hurts us deeply.
Kelly would need to face the angry men and their posters in order for things to go back to normalish, only she couldn’t get herself through the clinic’s door. This is what I want, she declared in the parking lot on two separate occasions, her voice an unconvincing whisper. Then Layla came along, and it was like she broke Kelly’s legs instead of her vaginal canal. Layla would be wailing for her 2:00 A.M. feeding, sounding like she was being waterboarded, and Kelly would just lie in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep through it. My father and I didn’t have much of a choice but to take on those shifts, and so we did, trading off for the first few months. Kelly needs her rest, my father said to me. She needs to recover. I was never quite sure what he thought she needed to recover from, but it was clear to me that it was the shock of her new life. At first, I was resentful of having to wake up in the middle of my REM cycle every other night. But after a few weeks, I actually started to look forward to having Layla all to myself, our time together unrushed and uninterrupted. Those tiny little fists, flying up over her ears in outrage as I eased the nipple of the bottle into her mouth—this is what I need?! Her fingers unfurling, her eyelids drooping, lifting, drooping, lifting to check that I was still there, drooping again as she realized this, this is what I need.
They say that first year is critical to the bonding process, and I think it’s why Layla and I are as close as we are. Kelly missed some special moments, and she can never get them back, all because she was resting, recovering. My sister has always needed someone to hold out her next life for her, like a coat she slips her arms into. Doctor, mother, CEO (in her mind)—these are more titles that have been foisted upon her rather than ones that she has sought out with purpose. My sister’s major malfunction is that she is a doer with no vision. I suppose I have the opposite problem.
Millennial journalists are always asking me where the idea for SPOKE came from, a sort of attrition in their voices. I get it. It’s hard to care about things that don’t impact us personally, and I think that’s what the Bustle staff really wants to ask but feels they can’t—why do I care so much about a group of women I’ve never met, going through something I have never gone through? How can I be so selfless? Is there something wrong with them that they can’t be that selfless?
The truth is that the idea for SPOKE didn’t come from a selfless place at all. After my father and I tracked Kelly to Fad’s apartment in the Hivernage district, our next stop was the hospital. She seemed fine, physically that is, but we just wanted to be sure. I was sitting in the waiting room, paging through a French tabloid, when the door swung open and in walked two sisters, one of them not much older than Layla is now. They spoke to the nurse at the front desk in soft French, and were given a series of forms to fill out. They came and sat down one seat to my right, the older one with the papers in her lap. Together, they pointed at words on the page and argued in a language that I know now was not French or Arabic. After a few minutes, the older sister spoke to me.
“Hello,” she said, with a little circle of her hand. It sounded like Halo.
I glanced up and found the older sister waving the pencil at me.
“You can help?” she asked, haltingly.
My father leaned into me. “I don’t think they can read.”