The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

are people who work through it, who fight for one another, who do it for the children. The life they thought they needed. But I had nothing to fuel the fire. Nothing to give.

And then what you said hit me – shared custody. I’d be alone with her. That’s what you had meant when you’d asked, ‘What about Violet?’ You’d meant, ‘What about you and Violet, what about the life you’ll have to endure together without me? What about the days you don’t speak to each other, what about the nights she needs someone, and you just won’t do? What about the times she knows you’re pretending to care as much as you should? Who will believe her? Who will defend her? Who will comfort her? Who will light her up in the morning when she wakes? Who will love her on those days when she’s alone with you and needs to know everything will be okay? Who will believe her?’

You stood in your jeans and your gray sweater with your hands in your pockets and you watched me. Bare. Inadequate. I met your puncturing eyes.

‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’m her mother.’

61

Our brains are always watching. Looking for danger – a threat could come at any time. Information comes in and it does two things: it hits our consciousness, where we can observe and remember it. And it hits our subconscious, where a little almond-shaped section of the brain called the amygdala filters it for signs of danger. We can sense fear in less time than it takes for us to be aware of what we are seeing or hearing or smelling – just twelve-thousandths of a second. We respond so fast that it can happen before we’re consciously aware that something is wrong. Like if we see a car coming. Like if we see someone about to get hit.

Reflexes. They tell you about the most natural reflex in the world when you give birth to your baby – the oxytocin reflex. The mothering hormone. It makes the milk flow, fill ducts, stream into the baby’s mouth. It starts to work when the mother expects she needs to feed. When she smells or touches or sees her baby. But it also affects a mother’s behavior. It makes her calm, it reduces her stress. And it makes her like her baby. It makes her look at her baby and want to keep him alive.

There was a viral video circulating online of a famous woman, a young British aristocrat the tabloids loved, and her rambunctious young son. Three different times she’s catching him in perilous moments – swooping in to grab his hand as he falls down the wet steps of an airplane, yanking the neck of his shirt on the slippery bow of a yacht, pulling him back from a polo pony’s path in the nick of time. Like a viper snapping a mouse in the clutches of her jaw. The instincts of a mother. Even that mother – flanked with nannies, brooched and heeled, with a fascinator pinned to her curls.

Violet picked up my phone one Sunday morning not long after you moved out and found the video on YouTube. She took the seat right next to me on the couch, in the beam of warm weekend sun. I’d been reading. She held the phone up.

‘Have you seen this?’

I watched it. She stared at me intently for the entire sixty seconds.

‘The mom saves her kid every time,’ she said.

‘So she does.’ I put my book down and reached for my tea. My hand trembled holding the cup. I wanted to smack her. I wanted to knock her head back into the couch and make her mouth bleed.

You stupid fucking little girl. You killer.

Instead I left the room and cried quietly over the kitchen sink as the water ran. I was so sad. I missed him desperately. It was almost his fourth birthday.

62

I stared at the empty space you left in our bedroom. You’d taken Sam’s painting when you moved out. I sat on the floor and visualized it there, the mother, the cupped hand on her chin, her grasp on the baby’s thigh. The warmth of their skin.

‘I’m hungry.’ Violet was watching me from the doorway, still dressed in what she had worn to school. ‘What are you looking at?’

‘We’ll order in.’

‘I don’t want takeout.’

‘I’ll make spaghetti.’

That worked – she left me alone. I didn’t want her there. I couldn’t lift my eyes from the nail hole in the wall.

I cooked while she finished her homework at the table. She had the same habit you did, putting her nose so close to the paper it nearly touched it as she wrote. I saw the hunch in her back and smiled without thinking. And then remembered you were gone. That you weren’t a person I should smile about anymore.

‘You want to have ice cream after dinner and watch a show?’

‘We don’t have a television anymore.’

‘Right. We could play a game?’

She didn’t need to answer that one.

‘What time is it? We could probably still make a movie, a later show.’

‘It’s a school night.’ She vigorously erased something and brushed the flakes of rubber on the floor.

‘Well, I was going to make an exception.’

I slipped an apron on while I stirred the sauce. I’d gone shopping for new clothes while you moved out of our house. I wore one of the sweaters, a cream-colored cashmere wrap, straight home from the dressing room at the department store. I never did this sort of thing, buy piles of expensive new clothes at once, but I had wanted to feel reckless that day and it was the best thing I could think of. You were still paying the Visa bill.

‘She has that sweater you’re wearing.’

She. I stopped stirring, as though if