The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

your son. You had been given another chance. And then it hit me – the thirty-eight weeks it takes to grow a baby from conception. That she conceived in September, the month before you were fired from your job. That you would have known she was pregnant well before the time I asked you to leave. You knew the whole time. You knew.

‘Um, you know, he just sort of slept. I didn’t have to do much.’

‘Oh, really? Like from how old?’

The room felt thick. I thought of her pushing the baby out. Of you watching your new boy come to life.

‘Maybe four months or so? I can’t really remember.’

‘I’m thinking of topping him up at night with some formula. They say that helps to fill their bellies. But I’m not really sure what kind –’

‘And the father?’

‘Sorry?’ She leaned closer – she thought she hadn’t heard me correctly, the question was so odd.

‘I mean, do you have a partner?’

‘I do. He’s great. He’s a great father. He just sent this, actually.’ Shesmiled and pulled out her phone. Her lips moved slightly as she searched for a photo to show me, as though she were talking to herself. She held the picture up and lifted her eyebrows, waiting for my reaction, like it might be a photo of a huge, unwieldy erection. The baby was swaddled, asleep in a crib. The sheets had stars and moons. I couldn’t see the baby’s face from the angle of the photo. I took the phone from her and stared at the wrapped-up human who shared our dead son’s DNA. ‘He can get him to sleep so easily. They really love each other.’

‘Very sweet.’ I handed it back and touched my hair, remembering the wig. I needed to get out of there – it was too hot, too loud all of a sudden.

‘And you? Do you have a partner?’

‘I don’t – I … he was never in the picture. So. Single mom.’ I nodded, confirming the lie to myself, hoping she didn’t ask more.

‘You know, Anne, you look familiar to me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah, I feel like we’ve met before.’

‘Maybe.’ I turned toward the coat pile. I had to leave.

‘Where’d you go to school?’

‘Oh, a small place out west –’

‘Do you do yoga?’

‘Yeah, maybe that’s why. I’ve tried a bunch of different studios, so maybe we crossed paths?’

‘No … I don’t think that’s it.’

I started making my way out. She followed.

‘I’m out and about in the neighborhood a lot, maybe we’ve just –’

‘Oh. Shit. I know.’ She snapped her fingers. I held my breath and looked at the door.

‘It’s just a resemblance – my spin instructor. You look a lot like her.’

I phoned you in the cab on the way home. Four times. I knew you wouldn’t pick up. I ached to speak with you, to ask you if he looked like Sam. If he had the same pout, the same smell. I’d forgotten to ask her the baby’s name. I realized that we hadn’t spoken to each other since the baby was born. Maybe you thought I’d taint your life somehow if you heard my voice, take something away from the experience you deserved. She seemed like a wonderful mother – I could tell just by being near her. She felt like a very, very good mother.

66

I wonder if you watched as her vagina, swollen and burning, opened up to release a new being, half of you, into the hands of a doctor who congratulated you on your son. A boy, for the second time. I wonder if your eyes filled with tears as they placed the slippery baby on her sweaty chest and saw him gape toward her nipple. I wonder if you held that woman’s shaking hand while they yanked thread through the skin of her perineum, pulled and tugged until the damage was dealt with. I wonder if you took her by the elbow and led her to the toilet in her room, where she cried in pain and hovered with shaking thighs, blood pouring from her, her insides heavy, her vulva pulsing, her body so weak after an experience so strong. Did you squirt warm water up into her bloody parts like the nurses taught you before? Did you get into that wide hospital bed with her, and the baby, and wonder how you’d ever loved a different woman? Did you put your phone on silent so she wouldn’t hear my texts as she was trying to get colostrum into the baby’s mouth? Did you argue to circumcise his penis, like you did with Sam? Did you take her home to bed the next day, in soft jersey cotton pajamas she’d bought just for the occasion? And was that bed you took her to the place where you made this baby, the place where you came inside her with such euphoria that you didn’t give a shit what happened afterward?

I couldn’t sleep for days after meeting her.

I couldn’t sleep until I went into the basement.

I brushed off the layer of dust on the storage container. Inside were Sam’s things. Onesies, blankets, footed pajamas, a few other little things he loved. Benny the Bunny. I carried the box upstairs to the foot of my bed and began my ritual. Night-light on. Organic lavender lotion on my hands, the kind I used to rub on his skin after his bath. The white noise machine was at the bottom of the box. Ocean waves. I placed it on the bedside table.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember every last thing of his inside. The soft mint-green one-piece from your mother. The pajamas that matched Violet’s. The muslin blanket with the hearts on it. The tiny red socks. The flannel blanket from the hospital. I could list them all, I could do it again right now, a game of memory. None of it had been washed. So much of