The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

‘I want to introduce you to someone. This is Violet, my daughter.’ Violet looked quickly at the stranger in the chair and mumbled a hello.

‘Oh. She’s lovely, isn’t she?’

‘She certainly is.’

‘Do you know how I got here?’ she asked me. Her face was worried.

I took her hand again. ‘You were driven here in a car. You lived not too far away from here, in a house on Downington Crescent. Do you remember?’

‘I don’t remember.’

A nurse came in with a covered tray and put it on the small rolling table. ‘Dinnertime!’

‘Leda, I want you to meet my daughter.’ She tugged at my hands and beamed at the nurse. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

Violet looked at me for the first time. She stood up and walked toward the door, her hands on her elbows. Her chin lowered, and I wondered if she might cry. The nurse smiled at me and then turned down the bed, fluffing the thin pillow. She dropped two capsules in a foam cup on the bedside table and then lifted the cover on the dinner tray. The room filled with the awful smell of hot, canned vegetables. Violet turned away from us.

‘Oh. I’ve got to eat and get ready for bed now.’ She slowly stood up from her chair and tried to fold the blanket that had been on her shoulders. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. I arranged her dinner setting for her and put her crossword book on the dresser. Violet eyed me quietly until the toilet flushed and then we watched her settle herself back in the chair.

‘We’ll get going, then.’ I leaned down to kiss her cheek. ‘I’ll come visit you for the holidays. Have you seen Daniel or Thomas? Have they come by lately?’

‘Who are they?’

‘Your sons.’ I’d lost touch with them long ago.

‘I don’t have any sons. I only have you.’

I kissed her again as she stared at the knife and fork, wondering what to do with them. I put the fork in her hand and helped her stab a green bean. She nodded and then brought the bean to her lips.

We got in the car and I let it run for a minute. I waited for Violet to take out her phone and start texting. She didn’t. Instead she looked straight ahead while we found our way back to the highway under the dark sky. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Halfway home she finally spoke to me.

‘Who was that woman? She wasn’t your mother. She was Black.’ Her tone was biting. Like I had been trying to fool her. Like I had wanted to make her feel stupid somehow.

‘She was the closest thing I had.’

‘Why don’t you find your real mother?’

I paused, thinking about how to answer her truthfully.

‘Because I’m scared to know who she became.’

I looked away from the road to her shadowed profile. Sadness squeezed my throat. For nearly fourteen years I’d wanted to find something between us that wasn’t there. She had come from me. I had made her. This beautiful thing beside me, I had made her, and there was a time I had wanted her, a time I thought she would be my world. She looked like a woman now. There was feminine wisdom growing in her eyes and she was about to thrive without me. She was about to choose a life that did not include me. I would be left behind.

1975

Cecilia knew early on she wasn’t meant to be a mother. She could feel it in her bones as womanhood set in. When she would see a child with his hand in his mother’s, dragging his feet along the ground, she’d look the other way. This was a physical reaction for her, like wincing when the water was too hot from the faucet. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t have that thing other women did – she didn’t feel nurturing or see the joy of a chubby little thigh. And she certainly didn’t want to see herself reflected in another living thing.

Her period had come every month since she was twelve, like a faithful friend reminding her: You bleed. You shed. You don’t need a baby inside you. Don’t listen when the world tells you that you do.

She had dreams and freedom. But then she gave it all up.

When the baby moved inside her, sometimes Cecilia wondered if her feelings were changing. Once she stood naked in the mirror and watched the lump of the baby’s foot move across the top of her stomach, tracing the arc of a crescent moon. She laughed out loud and the baby moved some more. She laughed some more. They were having a moment of fun, the two of them.

They sedated her for the labor. The baby didn’t want to come out, so they cut Cecilia three ways and used forceps that made the baby’s head look like a triangle. When Cecilia came to, the baby was already wrapped in flannel somewhere in the patch of newborns.

‘You had a girl,’ the nurse said to her, like it was exactly the thing Cecilia wanted to hear.

Seb wheeled her to the window and knocked on the glass to get the nurse’s attention.

‘She’s that one.’ Cecilia pointed right to the baby, three rows in, four to the left.

‘How do you know?’

‘I just know.’

The nurse picked up the baby and held her high for them to see. She was wide-eyed and still. Cecilia thought she looked just like her old doll, Beth-Anne.

The nurse asked through the glass if she wanted to feed her. Cecilia looked up at Seb and asked if they could go outside instead. He took her out through the front doors of the hospital in her slippers and nightgown, the IV pole rattling on the cement. He gave Cecilia her cigarettes and she stared at the parking lot while she smoked.

‘We could get in the car now and go. Just us.’