The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

took that space to turn inward. To him. We were happily each other’s worlds, even as early as that. Mother and son.

When the technician rolled her wand over the mass of white static and said, You’ve got yourself a boy in there, I closed my eyes and I thanked God for the first time in my life. I kept the news to myself for two days – it took you that long to ask what had happened at my ultrasound appointment. This was uncharacteristic – you had cared enough during my first pregnancy to come to every one of them. We were, at that point, passing each other in the night. You had several big projects on the go, new clients with big money. I needed so little of you then. I had him.

Violet wanted to help me go through her old baby clothes. We sat together in the laundry room and folded the tiny sleepers as they came out of the dryer. She would lift each one to her nose as though she were remembering a time and place when she wore them. I let her dress her doll in a knitted sweater and she pretended to nurse him. I marveled at the unusual carefulness with which she touched everything, the softness of her voice.

‘This is how you did it,’ she said, gently bouncing the doll twice to the right and then twice to the left, and then back to the right again.

At first I didn’t know what she meant – I didn’t remember doing that with her. But I took the doll from her and stood up and mimicked how she’d just rocked the baby. The familiarity of the motion came back to me instantly. She was right. I laughed as I kept bouncing the doll back and forth, and she giggled, nodding her head.

‘I told you!’

‘You’re absolutely right.’

It seemed impossible that she would remember this, that it would stay with her all these years. She put her hands on either side of my huge belly and mimicked that same motion for the baby inside me, rocking with my belly in her little hands. Soon we were dancing, the three of us, to the rhythm of the spinning washing machine.

36

I felt down with my hand as his head came through the hot ring of my cervix. The release was euphoric. You watched me guide him from my body’s opening and then lift him quietly, carefully, onto the place he’d filled for 283 days. You’re here. He looked for me and arched his back and then he began to slink up my stomach, like an inchworm covered in vernix and blood. His mouth was open and his glassy eyes were still black. His twitching, wrinkled hands looked covered in far too much skin. They found my breast and his little chin shook. He was my miracle. I pulled him to my nipple and tapped its nub on his bottom lip with arms that still shook from the oxytocin. There you go, sweet boy. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

‘He looks just like Violet,’ you said, peering over my shoulder.

But he didn’t look a thing like her to me. He was seven pounds of something so pure, so blissful, that it felt as though he might float away above me, a dream, something I would never deserve for as long as I lived. I held him for hours, my skin stuck to his, until they made me get up for the bathroom. The blood poured from me into the toilet and when I looked down at the mess, for some reason I thought of our daughter again. And then I stepped slowly back to my son in the glass bassinet outside the bathroom door.

I remember so little else about how he came into this world.

I remember everything about how he left it.

1969

Cecilia got her period when she was twelve years old. By then she had breasts larger than any other girl in her class. She walked with her shoulders rolled forward, trying to hide the new signs of her womanhood. Etta wasn’t speaking to her much at that point, let alone broaching the subject of puberty with her. Cecilia had heard from other girls about the bleeding, but still her heart stopped when she saw her wet, red underwear. She went through her mother’s cupboards looking for sanitary pads, but there were none. She doubled over in pain on the bathroom floor, saw the blood come through her pants, and decided she should tell her mother.

Etta didn’t answer when Cecilia knocked on her mother’s door, but there was nothing unusual about that – it was three o’clock and she slept most afternoons. She went to Etta’s bedside and whispered her name until she startled awake. Etta sighed when Cecilia told her what had happened – in pity or disgust, Cecilia wasn’t sure.

‘What do you want from me?’

She didn’t answer because she didn’t know. Her throat tightened. Etta opened her bedside drawer and took out two pills from a small red makeup bag that she hid from Henry. She held them out to Cecilia and slipped her other hand under the pillow and closed her eyes.

Cecilia stared at the little white pills, placed them on the bedside table, and left the bedroom. She found her mother’s purse in the hallway and took whatever change she had to the pharmacy. Her face burned as she paid for the pads, looking away from the young man at the cash register. At home she ran a hot bath and Etta came in to use the toilet just as she sank into the tub. Etta peed with her eyes closed.

Later that afternoon, Cecilia stood outside Etta’s bedroom door. An unfamiliar rage crept up her chest. She charged inside and flipped on the light.