Praise for

Blue Hour

•

“Blue Hour is a poetic and feverish debut, a story that laces together the struggles of marriage and motherhood, art and artist, race and violence in America into a powerful web, much bigger and stronger than its slender spine would suggest. If you loved Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, the work of Rachel Cusk, or Luster by Raven Leilani, this book is for you.”

—Ashley Warlick, author of The Arrangement

“An exquisite, melancholic portrait of motherhood and marriage for a biracial woman in America. Tiffany Clarke Harrison writes about miscarriage with fleshy, beating rawness, leaving us painfully undone and beautifully seen. Blue Hour has captured the dark question of modern motherhood amid police brutality and racism in America—do we really want to bring kids into this? There is no other book I’d rather read than hers … I never want to love or lose again without it.”

—Sarah Hosseini, writer, journalist, and professor

“Blue Hour is a pulsing and powerful novel about grief, motherhood, storytelling, and self. At once ragged, raw, and transcendent, Harrison’s novel marries the universality of maternal love and loss with the specificity of mothering Black and biracial children in contemporary America. A short, beautiful, intensely present work of art.”

—Lydia Kielsing, author of The Golden State

“In a world full of demands and distractions, Blue Hour asks us to pause and sit with our grief. Challenging, intimate, and relevant, this novel is a meditation on the boundaries of hope.”

—Osa Atoe, author of Shotgun Seamstress

For my grandparents Audley and Agnes Webster

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

—JAMES BALDWIN

Part I

The therapist asks how I feel, and I tell her, dismembered. I do not know where the pieces have been discarded. Even if I did, how would I begin to put them back together?

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…

For days in my head, this rhyme.

It all started with The Metamorphosis.

You were sitting in the back office of your store, Meir, chain-smoking at seven in the morning, waiting for me to take photos for a magazine. The editor had told me little about you except for your name, Asher Fromm, and titles: tie designer, owner. Despite the bell’s jangle, you hadn’t heard me come in. You always say you noticed my hair first. You say it billowed and rolled like a cloud down my back, and then you coat my neck with kisses. I stood in front of the bookshelf at the entrance, intrigued by your attempt at cleverness or culture. A large plant leaf obscured half of the top shelves, and books with torn spines were stacked beneath chairs. It was a men’s clothing boutique, not a bookstore, and you’d written WORDS FOR EVERY MAN on a cut piece of chalkboard that hung from twine on a tack. I picked up The Metamorphosis, opened it, and put the pages to my nose, inhaled.

“What are you doing?”

“I like to get acquainted with a space before prodding its intimate corners with a lens.” I removed the book from my nose, leafed through the pages. I had yet to look at you. “It’s not the fifties, but a certain amount of modesty and manners still goes a long way.”

I put down the book, plucked another from the shelf, and ran my fingers along the spine. Music played. Guitars and drums.

“Your store is gorgeous. The classic novels are a nice touch. It’s like a tailored rock star, a hipster, and a member of the Nation of Islam walk into a bar—and read Hemingway.”

“God, you’re strange.”

I turned, glimpsed your face.

“It bodes well for me.”

“I’m Jewish, though, not Muslim. So it would be more like ‘a tailored rockstar, a hipster, and a Jew walk into a bar.’”

“I’m Black, Haitian, Japanese. So now that we’ve got our census information out of the way, where would you like to start?”

“I like you.” You smiled.

The feathered scar on your jaw was my favorite.

In a few months we would be married. Stand before a judge. Me in black combat boots and a white minidress, and you in a trim burgundy floral print suit. We linked arms and held hands. Repeat after me, the judge said, and we repeated. Recited vows as somewhat strangers, then family. I could hardly bring my tongue to curl around the word family, project it. So why do I consider it now? Why do I consider my parents and sisters? Our baby, dead before birth? Now as the world bears down on Black bodies (another man killed), and I am tired. Now that I’ve had enough.

You read aloud to me on the couch, squinting through glasses at the words by the dim stutter of candlelight. The power was out, a storm, and our apartment glowed gold with swaying flames on the shelves, with sprawling plants and piccolo, and on the hearth near the leaning stack of found paintings and frames. The moon was high, clear. The steady sheet of rain had thinned. You read from your favorite book: A Sport and a Pastime. The dropout bathes the French girl. His prick goes into her, and he discovers the world. My legs were draped across your lap and you stroked my shin and knee. I was on my back, the linen of my robe pulled open. Exposed. A patch of dark grew tangled between my legs. I turned and saw myself in the mirror of that leaning stack, my face splattered with freckles, and turned back to you. “I’ll read,” I said, and thumbed through the pages. I responded with raised hips, pauses between words, to your fingers inside me, your mouth.

This is pre-miscarriage when we insisted on late nights and liquor and displays of whatever the hell we wanted. Like the first time Meir made a coveted list in a national magazine, and damn if you couldn’t stop touching me; hands hovering and gliding inside my coat, and along the thin cotton of my dress as we hurried to a dinner party, thirty minutes late. You are the punctual one, but that night our lateness was your fault. You insisted on lathering every bend of vertebrae and my skin in your scent. At the party, I had gone to the bathroom and when I came out you were drinking and laughing with a friend on the fire escape. An entrepreneur friend from college who wanted to invest in your business so you could open a second store. The night, beautiful and crisp, ushered a breeze into the party. I said hello, held your elbow, and pressed my lips to your cool ear. “We have to go. I’m spotting,” and later I delivered a pulpy plum-sized sac on our bathroom floor. We put it in a glass jar as instructed and took it to the hospital. You handed the jar to the doctor and said, “Here’s our baby.” You didn’t open a second store after that. We said we’d wait for life to be normal again but failed to say what that meant.

“I never thought I wanted children,” I say to the therapist.

“Why is that?”

The sac on the bathroom floor, on those tiny black-and-white square tiles and under the pipe bending down from the sink. I see it. My insides on the outside, like looking at my muscle. I’d squatted there, gripping that pipe, and when I felt the sac release, I kicked it away with my bare foot.

I tap my finger against the leather of the couch. “Did you hear? The guy they shot in the parking lot of a grocery store yesterday, the one getting into his car or something, he died this morning in the hospital.”

Her cheeks are flushed and pinker than I remember in her photo online. Her dark chest is large, and the buttons across it strain with each inhale as she waits.

“I hurt people with my selfishness,” I say.

“How so?”

I laugh. “It’s still pretty early in our relationship, let’s pace ourselves.”

“Ah, silly me.” She smiles, tapping her forehead with her fingertips. “All that ‘the truth shall set you free’ bullshit can’t be rushed.”

I make a Neanderthal sound, somewhere between a grunt and a laugh, grinning. How dare she build rapport with me? Sneaky little therapist.

The truth is, the moment I first saw you dance wild with arms darting, hair flopping in your laughing face, I knew I wanted a clone of that uninhibited joy to grow inside me. I had decided against having children years ago, right after the abortion. This was before I knew you, but then after I knew you, I started to change my mind. Yes. I could be a mother. Yes, I’d changed my mind. Could my malfunctioning body and the reality of this American nightmare change it back?

“My husband loves me, but my blood rejects me.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“They die. Or willingly let me go.”

“You’re referring to your family’s car crash? Your parents and younger sister.”

“And the baby. And my other sister. My own body. It doesn’t want a baby, and nobody can tell me why. Why doesn’t it want to have a baby?”

“Do you want to have a baby?”

“Yes. But I am afraid.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“It’s like after they died and left, everything in me shut down. It didn’t know how to function.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why don’t you know how to function?”

“Isn’t that your job to figure out? How the hell should I know?”

“Because you do know, and it’s my job to get you to see it. So, as early as it is in our relationship, I’ll be up front and let you know that telling me a bunch of facts isn’t going to get you there. Feeling something will. So I’ll ask you again, what are you afraid of?”

I am exhausted and don’t feel like talking anymore. The therapist waits. It is only our third session, but I’ve caught on to her. She will always wait me out.

“I had a dream once,” I say. “After the crash, I dreamed that I opened my mouth so wide that you could see all the way down to everything I’d ever thought but never said and it was horrifying being that human. Like my muscles were on the outside. Have you ever seen a muscle? The raw flesh of it? It’s disgusting.”

You like abandoned things. Hidden things. Tucked away and forgotten things.

In the beginning, we rode the Triumph into the city as you took me on a tour of your favorite hidden places. A garden at the bottom of a gravelly hill on the West Side. You’d once sketched designs for ties there, and started smoking, and wrote songs until you realized you were terrible at writing songs but kept up with the smoking and tie sketching. Dank alleys, all mildew and garbage, were favorite spots to watch the sunset the year you dropped out of school. NYU. You became a line cook instead at some hot shit restaurant in Manhattan. Rich, middle-aged white women who got sad sometimes talked to you there. They wanted to have fun with the young tattooed guy who flipped their salmon on the grill and drizzled it with lemon-garlic butter and capers, who now smoked in the alley. They’d flirt and you’d flirt to make them feel good. You’d let them touch your hair, sandy brown and clumped with sweat, always falling in your eyes.

And there was the warehouse. Peeled paint and textured, cement walls, floor. It was winter when you took me. Wind burst through broken windows. It howled, scraping against jagged edges of glass. “My dad taught me how to play chess here,” you said. “In the winter because he wanted to test my ability to focus.” You pulled a tiny wooden case from inside your jacket and sat on the gray ground. Never mind the dust, debris. You opened the case. Chess pieces toppled on the soft red velvet. “Would you like to play?”

I sat and you asked about my parents. I told you my father grew up in Haiti and laughed a lot. He was a boxing trainer. My mother was born and raised in New York by my Japanese grandmother and her family. My mother’s grandparents hated her, ostracized her, called her the Dark Devil. A lot of people in their community did. She loved her mother, my father, and my sisters and me more than herself.

I asked about your parents. You said, “In the end, they didn’t like each other much.”

There was a student of mine, Aja, who had the biggest Afro I’d ever seen, the perfect sphere. Two months ago, I had taken a few students to that abandoned warehouse and she was the only one to use the backlight from a window to frame her subject. I told her it was smart of her and she said, “Smart?” “Yes,” I said. It was the first time in months of classes I’d seen her smile.

Soft-spoken with squinty eyes and purple high-top sneakers, Journey took photos that felt live, in real time. Ray was slightly deaf in his right ear and liked photographing dead pigeons. Keeva spilled the developer, and Sarai hung her photos equidistant with clothespins on the string.

And Noah. He waited for the other boys and girls to leave the mobile darkroom (an old food truck I’d refurbished to teach my photography classes). They would make fun of his sensitivity. He inched over to my hip, head lowered and shoulders crouched as if to protect his heart, and lifted the photo in his hands, presenting it to me like a gift. The photo was of a little girl jumping rope on an empty sidewalk. She wore a blue cotton dress with white tennis shoes, white socks. Weeds bent, parched from the summer sun, in the cracks beneath her hopping feet. She laughed wide-mouthed. Two of her top teeth were missing. Noah said, “When you’re alone, you can be anything you want.”

That night, next to you, you said I was groaning and kicking in my sleep. The sheets, my T-shirt, and hair were saturated with sweat, and my body heaved. You shook me and I woke, giddy yet terrified, searching the emptiness between my legs. You asked if I was dreaming and I said no. But I lied. I dreamt of horses and the baby we’d lost. How the horse pushed him out of her body, and he dropped to the ground, thrashing and sticky. Ready to run.

Times Square is shut down. Only foot traffic is permitted to pass. The streets are tightly packed with bodies in various stages of mourning, outrage, and disbelief. Packed for Noah. I take their photos. Noah’s mother had been on the news. She’d sent him to buy milk for his baby sister. She told him to buy a treat with the change because she knew how disappointed he was that the free photography class he’d signed up for that weekend, my class, had been canceled at the last minute. My fertility specialist wanted to see me. She could get us in earlier than expected.

It rained on and off all day, that day at the fertility specialist. It was a surprise, the rain, and men, women, and children scurried throughout the city sidewalks with drenched hair and soggy shoes. You held the door open to the doctor’s office. My boots squeaked against the bright white of the linoleum. We walked side by side, holding each other down the hall. I leaned into you and said, “The brown, inexplicable boogie woman’s going to trap you. She’ll slip into your dreams and make you love her. Like the Sirens circling beneath the sea and tugging at your silly little ship.”

Apparently, I still believed in miracles. That too was a surprise, and I was afraid.

Across town, the corner boys followed Noah, knocked the milk out of his hands before punching him in the jaw, in the nose, in his ribs. They laughed and left, dumping the milk out along the sidewalk. Noah readjusted his glasses, held his side, and hobbled the long way home in the opposite direction. When the cops hung out their windows and told him to stop, he did. “Why the bloody nose?” they asked. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Really, nothing?” “Really.”

I find you in front of two older couples whose wide-stretched hand-holding unintentionally blocks the sidewalk. Your head pokes out over the rest. Your hazel eyes, a complicated mélange of muted earth tones behind glasses, watch a woman, a teacher from P.S. eighty-something, speak into a microphone. She reads from a list of names, ending with Noah’s. Critical condition. Shots to the back for reaching for the chocolate bar in his back pocket. I clutch my abdomen and say it, the statement I’ve thought no fewer than six thousand times since we left the doctor and Noah’s name bled against the television, the internet, the world.

“If we don’t get pregnant, I don’t want to try again.”

“What?”

“I can’t try again.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I can’t bring a kid into this. I won’t.”

The night air is rich with heat and humidity. Foreheads and cheeks glisten with sweat. The speeches end and we walk toward the subway. The crowd marches, thousands of people holding one another, chanting, and carrying signs. I’ve gotten ahead of you, snapping photos, and twist around to see you lumbering several feet behind me. Colored, flashing lights of billboards reflect in your glasses. When you see me, you catch up and hold my hand.

Voices raise. A scuffle. A shout rings out, shattered glass, and a bang. The herd of bodies thickens and shifts in an agitated wave as police storm the streets. A gray cloud of gas explodes into the air. Everyone runs, screams. A high-pitched scraping of vocal cords and eardrums, deep-bellied, animal cries. I let go and lose you, stop and stand in the middle of the sidewalk clicking, clicking, clicking the camera. A stampede. A woman—I see her. On hands and knees, retching and blinded by gas, gripping the gravel, screaming for help and he kicks her. A black boot to the jaw and a baton at her back. Mouths pull open with rage, and I begin to rush to her, but someone scoops her up, blood flooding her mouth. It spills down her neck as she’s flung to some false sense of safety. I turn and a cop car pushes forward. Pushes. Pushes into the bodies standing arm in arm. They let each other go and push back, but it is no use. I run toward them as bodies fall. Shots. You yell my name from somewhere behind me and it is a ravaged, strained sound. You grab my arm. We run. I am too slow and you grip my hand so tight, crushing bones.

A little boy holds on to his father, legs and arms wrapped around him as they flee. The father, his eyes red and tearing, mere slits in his panicked face, grips the boy in a full embrace, squeezes him to his chest. Is he crying from tear gas? Or are they actual tears? Because he knows he can never fully protect the child. None of us can. We can barely protect ourselves.

•

The therapist keeps a rubber-band ball on the table beside her rattan chair. She only uses gray and white bands, and it is bigger since the last time I was here. I tell her about Noah in the hospital. She asks about the protest. I don’t talk about it much. I tell her about the woman who was kicked in the face by the cop. I see it every time I step outside. I walk a lot, to meetings and appointments, and I see her everywhere. She had wavy blond hair that was pulled back at her neck and the way she was bent over, on all fours on the ground, it almost seemed like a tail, it was so long. Her fists were full of the street, black with the street, and she hollered and cried, and he kicked her so swiftly. Kicked her right in the jaw, and her neck snapped to the side. Baton to the back. Twice. Baton to the legs until she was flat on the ground, barely moving. That’s what I tell the therapist.

“How did it feel to see that?”

“I mean, it was awful. How else is it supposed to feel?”

“What does awful feel like to you? In your body?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. If your being here for an hour every week is going to mean anything at all, it does matter. We’ve talked about intellectualizing over feeling. It’s a defense.”

“Fuck me,” I say, sigh, and rub my face with one hand.

I tell her that I am supposed to take a pregnancy test in about a week, and she doesn’t force me back to the question at hand. She only sits there as I intellectualize or, as she says, sharpen the stakes surrounding my heart.

I tell her IVF is expensive. It fucking hurts. “Have you ever had a needle in your cervix?” I say, and she says yes, in fact, she has. I ask her if it worked and she says no. She does not have children. Plenty of nieces and nephews, though, and I shout that it’s not the same, then apologize. I tell her that you and I are speaking but barely. You are hopeful. You think I haven’t seen the hat you bought for this baby that we don’t know whether or not it exists, but I have. I tell the therapist that it is gray and white too, like her rubber-band ball. Herringbone but in a punk kind of way. “What does that mean?” she says, and I tell her that it’s messier. That seems like an appropriate word.

When my younger sister, Maya, was fourteen, she was beautiful. It happened suddenly. I couldn’t believe that she became pretty, and I was forced to stay the same, with a face swarmed by freckles and our mother’s narrow eyes. People called her Princess Jasmine. So, one time, when we were walking through the mall and guys were wanting to fuck her, I pushed her into a door. She busted her lip and cracked a front tooth. I said it was an accident, but she didn’t believe me. This was just a few years before she and my parents died. A few years before the cliché of reckless sex with strangers that numbed me. I told one of the guys that story after the funeral, after sleeping with him for the first time, and he said that I was screwed up. I walk home from the subway after session six with the therapist. I’d told her the story. The rubber-band ball was bigger. A bus slows to a stop and begins again leaving a cloud of black smoke, and I cough. Police sirens, and I flinch. A headache squeezes my skull. I think to tell you about Maya too, to see what you’ll say, but when I get home you aren’t there, so I don’t.

When I was ten and had to create a family tree complete with flags from each member’s country of origin, I proudly included the Haitian, French, Ugandan, Japanese, and American flags. After I presented my family tree to the class and sat at my desk, Lorie Carlson, a pretty blonde with whom I climbed trees and held turtles in the woods behind my house, wrinkled her nose in disapproval and whispered, “What are you anyway? Like a mixed breed? Like a dog?”

The Black girls. They didn’t like the way I spoke; said I was trying to be white. They didn’t like my mix of kinky and wavy hair and told me to “straighten that shit” to fix it. In assembly, they littered it with wet globs of brightly colored chewed gum.

Some boys said, “You’ve got to talk to her in white-girl language. Or that ching-chong shit.”

On the subway an older woman speaks to me in Spanish. Her wrinkled pink lips are wide in an expectant grin, and I blink and tell her that I don’t understand. She is confused and tells me that I am Hispanic. It is a statement with a hint of a question. In her head she has decided and wants proof in my confirmation. When I deny her proof, she says, “What are you, then?” And I say, “La Virgen.”

The first time we slept together I woke up before you did and sat tucked in a chair across the room in my underwear but topless, looking out the window and smoking because I still smoked. “I’m usually gone by now,” I said when I heard you rustling. But I wasn’t gone because you were calm. You felt like a calm place to rest.

The third time, I made you an origami star out of a napkin from Rabbit Club on which I’d scribbled lyrics to your favorite song. You found it the next morning in your shoe and hummed “Soul to Squeeze” while flipping pancakes on the stove. The edges were burned just the way we like.

Before I decided not to have children, I decided not to get married. I would immerse myself in photography instead. I saw Carrie Mae Weems’s portrait Thoughts on Marriage, her pose perfect and pleasant in gown and veil, head cocked just so. Tape secures her lips. I would not sacrifice my desires for anyone else’s. And isn’t that marriage? Isn’t that motherhood?

“Why can’t it be whatever you want?” you asked once after I said this to you. After you mentioned loving me for the first time. I was twenty-eight and you were the first man since my father to say those words to me. My stomach, lungs, and heart stretched—I could not say it back. Was too afraid to say it back and chewed my tongue instead. We were in your back-office studio. You stood hunched over the wide table, gliding your favorite scissors effortlessly through fabric and your thick military glasses fogged with your concentrated breath and steaming coffee cup in the cold room. You refused the heat on Mondays when the store was closed. One of Chopin’s nocturnes played. Classical piano was required when you sewed, though the cello or the Ramones were your favorite.

“I can’t explain why,” I said. “Other than the more people you bring into your life, the more of yourself you give away.”

“Or the more you multiply. Love multiplies, it doesn’t deplete.”

“It absolutely depletes.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

I sat in the wooden chair by the door working but distracted by a corner of peeling wallpaper you missed or gave up on when renovating. It was mustard yellow with an antique patina. My legs were bare, and I was freezing, stubborn, still refusing the pants you’d offered because I’ll be fine. Winter feels like it lasts forever in New York. I stood and opened a cabinet, pulled out a roll of fabric tape. I adhered it to my lips piece by torn piece and watched you—your hair falling, the wing of a bird tattooed on your neck peeking out from your collar—and tried to picture you in Hamburg in this same position with the older woman you told me about, the designer who broke your heart. You picked up the habit of sewing to classical music from her. Those gray college-dropout days, post-line-cook days, spent in punk bars until she plucked you from a bar-brawl stupor and toyed with your willingness and need to love.

I crept behind you. Nuzzled my face along your back, between shoulder blades, into your armpit. You turned. I smiled beneath the tape and mumbled, “Kiss me. Kiss me now.”

You pulled off the tape.

“This is exactly what I mean,” you said. “You put the tape on, you can also take it off. It will be whatever you make it.”

“I envy your easy hopefulness.”

“It isn’t easy. It’s a choice.”

I kissed you. “I’m not the ‘I love you’ type, by the way. But I want to be.”

“How will I know, then?”

“You’ll know.”

The fertility specialist told us to wait two weeks. Today is day fifteen, and I have not taken a pregnancy test. By some marital telepathy, you know this yet refuse to ask why. All that you want is tied to the plus or minus sign of a urine-soaked stick, and your heart cannot bear it.

You once told me about a girl you’d gotten pregnant in college. She was nineteen at the time, a sophomore whose last name and major you didn’t know but she was a little drunk at a party and you were a little high and you both wanted hot dogs. You said that when she told you she was pregnant, your brain went white. It was running too fast, you couldn’t keep up, and you wanted to rip out your heart. You wanted to rip out that baby because the two of you combined barely equaled one semi-functioning adult. It wasn’t your body; you had no say. So you dated her instead. You broke up two weeks after she lost the baby. She slowly talked to you less and less until she didn’t talk at all.

We’re working in the living room. Day seventeen. Your fingers are furious against your keyboard, assaulting the letters, when the pounding suddenly stops and you lift your head.

“Is this about your parents? And Maya?”

I look up from the floor, where I edit photos, rub my eyes. I have been staring at a screen for hours and your face is a blur. “What are you talking about?”

“Your family. Does your not wanting to try anymore have something to do with them? It would make sense.”

“No,” I say, lips pinched despite your sincerity. “It doesn’t have anything to do with them, and it certainly doesn’t make sense that you would think so.”

My desk sits beneath the drafty, smudged window in the small studio I rent five subway stops away from the apartment (at times it feels so cramped, like the chipped brick walls are closing in to crush me and all my lenses and monitors, the glass vase of dead hydrangea collecting dust). I have two books on the desk beneath the windowsill: Giovanni’s Room and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both belong to your store, and I have an index card in the former with a quote from Fitzgerald I’d heard at a reading somewhere in the Bronx: “Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.”

Your favorite scissors, the sound they make, shhhhhhhhsssssttttttttt along the fabric. Severing, severing. Splits in the skin.

The only family I have left is my older sister, Viola, who lives an opposite life from me with two children, a husband, and religion in the suburban South. Our parents and our little sister, Maya, died in a car accident on their way back from getting me out of trouble when Viola was twenty-four and I was twenty-two. Maya was seventeen. Viola and I were both in Pennsylvania, where we grew up, and where our parents and Maya still lived when we heard the news. A trucker asleep at the wheel, an eighteen-wheeler, and a faulty guardrail equals a station wagon submerged sixty feet underwater. Viola blamed me, and we coped in our separate ways, one likely more constructive than the other. I did drugs and slept with half the campus. Viola pretended to be a lesbian and then found Jesus.

She was engaged once before her current husband to a man-child we called Dex, short for Dexter. I don’t remember how he and I once ended up at the house alone together. Dex helped himself to shots of my father’s rum and came upstairs to find me rifling through the linen closet. I smelled him before I heard him. I said hey and he said hey and tried to kiss me. He slid the palm of his hand against my neck and I flinched, reared my right elbow back, and cracked him across the mouth the way my father had trained all three of us girls to do. A thin red line streamed between his smiling teeth. I rushed to my room, locked the door, and threw up inside an empty plastic shopping bag. My elbow throbbed, the exposed marbled pink flesh of it.

There are things that will rip my skin open and allow all the shit I have shoved down and inside to come screaming out.

The one time we were pregnant, we named the baby because my body hadn’t caught on yet, and for two weeks I traipsed happy and unaware from subway, to studio, to restaurant, and back home keeping death warm in my belly. They scraped out my insides while I resolved not to cry on the table. Friends left meals at the front door without knocking. They texted you instead. We sat on the side of the bed, not touching, and watched airplane lights against the black velvet of sky.

“Where do you think he is?” you said.

“In the stars.”

For weeks after you fell asleep at night, I sat on the fire escape blinking at the way-over-there sky and telling our kid stories.

On the news Noah’s mother stands outside the hospital where he lies in recovery. Bullets removed, skin stitched and patched on his back, except for one too close to an artery. The voice-over says if the bullet migrates one way, they will attempt another surgery. Should it migrate another, a stroke is possible, among other things. Petitions are signed. Hashtags created. No arrests. His mother does not speak. She only stares directly into the camera, eyes raw and red around the edges, breath shallow, gnawing her bottom lip until the skin stretches and pales.

I tell the nurse at the desk that I am his cousin. To keep my distance, this figurative space between us, this figurative barbed wire between us to ensure his safety in that warm, white hospital bed. That immaculate room with its bright window and sun. I cannot get through or over or under or around to fuck him up any more than I already have. So, yes nurse, I am his cousin.

Noah’s door is open, and the blinds are pulled back from the windows. Daylight plays in the steel of hinges and poles where IV bags drip. A clear liquid. Something clicks and hums. His body is small and his eyes motionless beneath the lids as he sleeps. Plastic tubes thrust through his nostrils. His forehead is damp, and a thin sheen blankets the brown skin of his arms laid flat on the sheet. Breath streams in and out. I begin to say hello, but the word falls to pieces in my larynx or pharynx; some offending, sound-harboring tissue.

At home you sift through portfolios from local designers hoping to sell in your store and ask about my day. You barely look at me. I tell you the usual things: photoshoot, developing, found another vintage frame on a curb—omit: visiting Noah, buying a pack of cigarettes, and throwing them away across the street.

The day we met, you told me you liked me and asked if I wanted to get a drink. It was barely eight in the morning, and you said, “How about Rabbit Club? I know a guy who’ll get us in.”

“Beers and dark, tight spaces?”

“Is that innuendo?”

“Oh, you’re a dirty one, Asher Fromm.”

I took your photo.

You always say that I smiled so wide taking that first picture that my freckles jumped. As if freckles could do such a thing. As if such magic existed.

When you kissed me, you smelled like the woods: undisturbed soil and bark. I laughed in your mouth, and you held my face. “There they go again,” you said, and this time I believed.

Day twenty. You are in the bedroom getting dressed. You pull on clothes like a man pulls into his lover. Not some woman he sleeps with but a woman he adores. Of course, you own a men’s boutique. All of the merchandise has buttons or knots or things you have to fold and fuss over, to take your time with. Even the T-shirts with their washed-out, used façade seem graced by meticulousness. But that’s you. This is the way you view dressing: like laying the soft cloth of a woman’s body down and slipping through. You dress by the window in the corner, and while one side of your face is lit with morning, the other side hides in a shadow. The light is perfect, and you are far away in some honest, uncharted place. I don’t know where, only that I can’t get there. Not even with directions, a compass, or you holding my hand. You look up from your sweater, say, “I’m ready when you are,” and wait in the other room.

We ride the Triumph into the city for lunch. I grip your leather chest as we speed through the streets in a fantastic blur. Erika and Jameson meet us. They are tall and sleek, their presence enveloped in an effortless grace. People pause conversations, their eating and sipping, to notice them enter. The theater actress and the lawyer. Erika brushes a hair from her own freckled face. She is fair with dark auburn hair that sometimes frizzes in that perfect tousled, curly-girl way, and has about five fewer freckles than I do. Jameson is ebony-skinned, broad. Whenever the four of us are together people assume the wrong partner for each, no matter how we are paired. You, Jameson, Erika, and I have perfected the act of ignoring that Jameson and I have slept together. In college, but still. I am aware there is an expiration date here.

She’d introduced herself as I walked to the subway after a miscarriage support group meeting. Undeterred by my lack of sharing and enthusiasm over our shared freckles and uncooperative uteruses, she tracked me down and we walked quietly together. I was nauseous all the time and needed to vomit. Phantom pregnancy, the internet and the doctor said. Her building was around the corner, and she invited me in, told me to “get method with it” when I got to the toilet. She made me laugh and I thanked her. She also made tea for me, and as we stood in the galley kitchen with our steaming cups, I looked up to the front door flying open, and Jameson exclaiming my name.

Startled, I spit the hot liquid from my mouth back into the mug.

“Jameson,” I said, wiping tea from my chin.

“You know each other,” Erika crooned from the top of her cup as if performing.

Before I could open my mouth Jameson said, “We went to the same college. We had a few classes together.”

How quick men can be to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Yes, Jameson and I had been in college together. He sat halfway across the room in Biology 101 and had a shaved head, not the dreadlocks he knotted in a rubber band that day, and a shiny cubic zirconia earring in his left ear. His face was more handsome then, and girls of all types let him know. We slept together on every surface that would have us after my family died. I would walk to his dorm room, and when he moved off campus I’d walk to his apartment. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, or that we weren’t dating, or that I never said hello or goodbye when I came and went, or that his laugh reminded me of my father, or that his self-assured and warm presence irritated me to my bones. It didn’t matter because we were the same to each other: an opening, a landfill. A place to dump the madness in our heads. After we graduated, he asked if he’d ever see me again and I said, “Now is all that matters.” He told me I spoke like a girl with a secret in her voice.

I looked at Jameson in the kitchen and laughed, turned to Erika and said, “We’re going to get this out of the way now because I like you: Jameson and I have slept together. Many, many times.”

Erika tells us she lost another part in a play. Lost it to a twenty-six-year-old with less presence and a pug face. Makena drinks from a bottle in your lap. We did not know they were bringing her. Erika stopped breastfeeding last month after leaking at an audition. “Hey! With the freckles. Your tits are wet.”

“So, this documentary you need my help with,” Erika says to me. “It’s brilliant, necessary work. I’ll hook you up with a writer who can help with interviews and a script. She’ll also know the best way to get in touch with the mothers. Be prepared: some won’t respond well. You’re asking them to relive trauma, talking about their children…”

“Wait,” you say, shaking your head and bouncing Makena on your leg, bottle still in hand. “What is she talking about?”

I pretend the anger in your face is elation.

“Oh.” Erika looks between us, picking up her glass. “I’m sorry. I assumed you knew.”

“No, I didn’t know.” You frown.

Jameson slices sausage and scoops eggs. His back is straight. He is midthirties, with the skillful gift of listening and guiding toward the right decision—namely, his. “When the heart leads, we have to follow. Isn’t that right?” When he speaks he looks not directly at me (he never does) but somewhere beyond my shoulder before smiling and turning his enveloping gaze to his wife, who strokes the condensation on her glass with an index finger. She winks. A drunk Erika once told me I reminded her of his mother, who left his lobbyist father in D.C. for ashwagandha and herb gardens in Northern California when Jameson was twelve. She left with her thumb piano and another woman. It made him sick to think he’d begged her to stay and still she hugged him and let him go.

“Well,” you say, looking at your watch, still with Makena on your leg as she finishes the bottle. “We should go. I need to get to the store.”

“I thought you were off today.”

“We’re switching over for the season, and a lot of new stuff is coming in. I should be there.” You hand Makena to Jameson. “I’ll pay the check.”

It’s raining on the ride home. You bristle when I wrap my arms around your waist. You don’t want to feel me, to know that I exist. We stop at a light and I lean into your neck, into your ear, and struggle to apologize. I mean it, I am sorry, but my explanation comes out wrong and the light turns green. When we stop again, I tell you I have a pregnancy test in my top drawer and will take it when we get home. A young girl in a cab takes our picture with her phone. It must look like I’m kissing you, but you crane your neck in the opposite direction, shrugging off my words.

Sometime near the beginning, after your first “I love you,” I made you a short film about discarded pennies throughout the city. The score was an old woman’s heartbeat while laughing. We watched it on the laptop in your bed while eating spicy tuna rolls and potato chips with beer. You reached one tattooed arm out to pull me to you and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Now I know,” you said. “I know.”

In the bathroom I pee on the stick, staring at the spot on the checked floor beneath the curved pipe of the sink. The sac was slimy, purple-brown as a bruise, and I’d kicked it. (Whether it was accidental, I wouldn’t allow myself to know.) It left a smear on the floor; I’d scrubbed for weeks even after the smear was gone. The bruise on Noah’s face at the hospital was purple-black. I drop the test on the floor and begin to hyperventilate, hang my head between my knees and exhale in quick breaths between my teeth. “Shh, shh, shhhhh…” One big inhale, then repeat. I cover my eyes on the toilet, head down, and recite this thing like a Lamaze exercise, like prayer.

“A documentary will be stressful on your body,” you say outside the door. Your breath is heavy and desperate. “We’re waiting on starting another store to avoid that. Why wouldn’t we wait on this too?”

“Shh, shh, shhhh…”

It’s better this way, I guess. To take the test and see a minus sign, practically a middle finger and a “Fuck you!” from the beginning. To avoid the hopeful six weeks, nine weeks, twelve weeks. To avoid losing the swish and flutter of our baby’s heartbeat.

You slam the door taking out the trash and check the test again just in case: fuck you!

I win contracts to photograph a teahouse and a gallery in Greenpoint. At the shoot, the gallery owner wears a fantastic black sheath, a sheer black cardigan, and boots. Her thin lips are red, and her unibrow raises and dips as she speaks. After, I call and your phone rings and rings. The third time that week. I text you to say that I’ll be working late at the studio, and nearly four hours later you text back: “k.”

This from the man who once read to me by candlelight: “He has wrapped her in an enormous towel, soft as a robe, and carried her to the bed. They lie across it diagonally, and he begins to draw the towel apart with care, to remove it as if it were a bandage. Her flesh appears, still smelling a little of soap. His hands float onto her. The sum of small acts begins to unite them, the pure calculus of love.” It is my favorite part of the book, and I’ve memorized it with the inflections of your voice.

“k? k?! What are we, twenty-five now? The o is right there!”

Weeks later it is cold, and you make a fire. You still don’t like me much, but you woke up early and bought logs anyway. I make eggs and warm apple cider with bourbon before you leave for Meir.

“Inventory,” you say.

“Isn’t that why you hired Jill?”

“She’s new and wants my help.”

At night, I come out of the bathroom after a shower, wrapped in a towel and detangling my hair. You are home, reading, and when you see me you set the book down, ready. I smile. I’ve missed you. Missed this simple way. You press me against the wall of the hallway and kneel behind me, running your hand along the inside of my calf, my thigh. I’ve missed your hands and pretend we are brand new again. Those first few months. Love and lust. Sex in the bathroom at Bowery Ballroom. Fingered under stars on the ferry for the fun of it. Before. Before, before. My breath comes out against the mirror in front of me with a hiss. I reach back and grab your arm. After, we lie side by side the best we can in the narrow hallway. Nearly half of my naked body is on top of yours. I say, “Hello.” You take the side of my face in your hand and kiss me. I bite your lip and roll to my stomach. An invitation you cannot refuse.

“I know you don’t want a kid, but I do,” you say, standing, leaving me naked on the floor. “I want a child with you. However we have to do it. We could adopt.”

“I never said I didn’t want a child. I said I couldn’t go through it again.”

“We’ve always agreed, one kid.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Because you’re afraid.”

“Yes, because I’m afraid! My body is tired. My heart is tired. You need to understand something about what it means to be married to me, for me to have our children.” I rub my face, arms, and chest. My skin. “I know your life’s worth is something you’ve never had to consider, but our child will. That’s the reality we live in.”

“I get that. But the parallel reality is that I love you, and I want a family with you.”

“I can’t try again. Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know.”

“What, are you serious? What does that even mean, ‘I don’t know’?”

“Exactly that—I don’t know.”

“You’re leaving me…”

“Is that a statement or a question?”

“You tell me, Asher. Tell me something, anything that’s honest.”

“We’re selfish. You’re selfish for not wanting to try again, and I’m selfish for pushing you. I don’t know where that leaves us, okay? I don’t.” You grab your clothes from the floor and get dressed. “You think you’re the only one who is afraid? I’m afraid for our Black child too. I love him or her so much, and they aren’t even here. I’m afraid for them so much, and they aren’t even here. You think you’re the only one who suffers? I lost a baby too.”

You turn your back.

“Where are you going?”

But you don’t answer. For the second time in our lives together you slam the door.

That you didn’t like your mother wasn’t anything special, I said to you because at one time or another, most people don’t like their mothers. That I’d always liked mine, now that made me special, and you laughed. We were in New Orleans shooting a wedding. I was not a wedding photographer, but it was for a good client, an interior designer whose portrait I’d taken several times and who told me, “I can’t stand the idea of basic looking-over-my-shoulder-by-the-window shit.” You’d never been to the city and offered to assist. You held my bags and switched the lenses, made sure I had enough film. When the strap on my camera broke, you made one from your leather belt. The bride wore a cream dress of lace and fringe with cap sleeves, and feathers in her hair. Their first dance was in the middle of the street, trotting and sidestepping down the avenue, leading a procession to the reception at a mansion with a pool. After dinner, when the dancing had begun, the mother-in-law’s face flattened with disapproval, as if she’d stepped in manure, at the wet bridesmaids climbing out of the water, silk and chiffon stuck to their ribs. That’s when you’d said it, about not liking your mom, before taking a bite of cake.

I watched guests watch you dance with a bridesmaid, twirl her as you charmed with that fine gap in your front teeth. The square outline of your jaw. You wore a short suit and your legs were thin yet strong from years of soccer; shins and calves and one knee covered in floral tattoos, a blue whale, that “slave of light” portrait by that Italian painter, and all the rest. A man stood next to me sipping something clear. He asked how I knew you, and I told him we were married. He said beautiful boys like you commanded respect and affection, a gluttonous adventure. He held his s too long in boys and twisted his body slowly to the music as he watched you. I told him to take his proposition elsewhere.

We slow-danced beneath willows at three in the morning, the after-after-party, and you told me about the virgin your mom once sent to your place. A pretty woman. Jewish. Would make a good daughter-in-law. (You hadn’t known she was a virgin at the time, only later when your mother used this as a bargaining tool.) You had been a year into your store, drinking too much and growing paunchy. Your mother, she’d said to the woman, “He likes bourbon. Give him bourbon,” and the poor Jewish virgin, before she would try to give herself to you, she told you this. And you stroked her wavy black hair, waited a few moments too long to pull up your pants before kissing her on the forehead goodnight. The next morning, you came out of your office to find me standing there, smelling The Metamorphosis. That night we slept next to each other, and every night after that.

It is 1:27 a.m. and you have not come home. I fell asleep hours ago, about three hours after you left, after calling Erika to tell her what happened and clumsily pick it apart. Sirens woke me up. I turned in bed to find you missing and have not fallen back asleep. Your side of the bed is made, cold. This is new and I roll onto my back. Outside, a creaking noise, and I look to the window, to the stars, say, “Where did Dad go?” But I know where you are.

I didn’t tell you I went to see Noah the other day. His family was there, in the hospital room, and I didn’t go inside. The nurse asked for my name and I made something up, headed toward the stairwell. You were home early that day with your classical music and dress forms, taking pictures because you like the natural light at home better than the light at the shop. You asked where I’d been because I hiccupped and seemed fidgety, and I lifted the picture frame of tarnished brass I’d found and set it on the hearth with the stack. Said, “Walked to coffee with Erika.” It was true, but only partially. I wonder what you will say when you get back.

The store closes at ten. I don’t know who is on schedule to close today, but I am thinking Jill. The young girl with the happy ponytail and loose sweaterdresses. Her passionate mouth excited simple greetings into songs, “Oh, hello,” and “See you soon,” and eyes that shift between green and gray and draw attention and affection with the promise of good times. You refuse to be a cliché and I refuse to wait for you, to lie in this bed unnerved. I throw on sweatpants, rain boots, and a jacket. I am hungry and eat pizza a few blocks from the apartment. Grease drips onto the Styrofoam plate and paints my fingers orange.

As I head home, two homeless men ask me for money but I don’t have cash. The rain is coming down hard. I tighten my hood and see a man who looks like you from behind, but is not you, and I think about you leaving, storming off. I’d never seen your back in that context, fleeing from me with disdain.

You took the bike, I’m sure. Got the Triumph from the garage and shoved your helmet on. You left without a jacket, only the sweater you were wearing, which will leave you soaked and shivering. You probably sped out of the garage and into the night like a man on fire. I look down. The road is slick. You are reckless when angry. I’ve seen you skid and swerve on wet streets before, outraged. Petulant. Squeezing the handgrip tighter, until your nails dug into your palms. Until it hurt. Running traffic lights to outrun yourself, you’d said. Accelerating through intersections as horns blared, furious, but it was too late. You were already gone.

An energy healer recommended guided meditation when we couldn’t get pregnant after losing the baby. The one I’d found said our cells are listening to our thoughts. Like cookies online. Clear your history.

Funny how the mind remembers what it shouldn’t and plays in a loop of anguish, thoughts that will kill me. Vomits it up all yellow-green bile and sour sick. This insistence to remember what went wrong: at my parents’ funeral I told the reporter, “My dad said I was ugly, but, I mean, they did their best.” That night I had sex with Jameson and thought, Why did I do that? I repeated the question as he slept on the floor and ignored the answer that always followed.

In middle school, I received a scholarship to sleepaway camp for photography. “We should not be encouraging this,” my dad said to my mom, not diluting his accent as he did with the neighbors, our teachers, and friends. “She needs something more concrete, like science or math.”

“Why would you say that?”

“She’s Black and isn’t beautiful like you. Life won’t be as kind to her.”

I scrubbed my face for months.

“Was anyone there with you?”

“Jill,” you say. “She was closing and left soon after I got there.”

The second and last time I’d met her was at a party for the store, some sort of thanks for the local designers whose merchandise you carried. She was pale, dewy. Young. Kissed the designers on each cheek with an “Ugh! Have I missed you!” She talked about design school and flowers. “Floral design is a thing,” she said as if being thirty-four meant I didn’t know it was a thing, and how she won second place in a competition last year. She didn’t drink too much at the party but just enough to kiss me on the lips goodnight and laugh when friends came to grab her for another party downtown. My mouth was sticky with her gloss and mine. You didn’t see her do it, but later at home told me I tasted different as you unzipped my dress, and I slipped my hand down your pants. I hadn’t wiped my mouth. I wanted to know the taste of her just in case.

“Is that right?” I say. “She left after you got there?”

“Yes.”

Was it true, but only partially?

Erika puts me in touch with the writer who will work on the documentary for half her fee. The writer believes in the work and owes Erika a favor. We meet at Grand Central, and she suggests I focus the documentary on young boys and girls to tighten the concept. The morning smells yeasty. Pigeons step and peck at torn pieces of bread and sunflower seeds on the ground. It is October, overcast, with moist air. The sun burrows through the gray morning for only minutes at a time before being sucked back into the gathering clouds. “We’ll talk to the parents, other family members.” She is English and speaks in that singsongy way. “None of this ‘He was a straight-A student whom everyone loved’ nonsense.”

She’s referring to Noah.

“Is,” I say. “Present tense.”

She’s written and directed plays and short films in London—small playhouses that she packed tight with dismal marketing budgets and lesser-known actors. Erika told her about my work, and she’s looked me up, found the project I did after losing the baby, of women’s portraits with their miscarriage stories. “It happened at work, during an interview for the paper,” she says. “Fourteen weeks. I ignored the cramps until I couldn’t, and when I stood, my seat was thick with blood. They rushed me to the hospital. The baby was gone.”

“I’m pregnant,” I tell the writer. We are still at the station. “Six weeks.”

My doctor confirmed it this morning. Six weeks from having the most gratifying sex we’d had in more than a year, in our tiny hallway. I have not gotten pregnant on my own in years. But that day, that rainy Saturday with pancakes and fires and you coming inside me with more fervor than ever before, the night you didn’t come home, we conceived.

“Congratulations.”

She talks more about the film, and I think I will tell you about the baby when I am far enough along, whatever that means. I will tell you when telling you doesn’t seem like punishment. The body tightens, constricts with the expectation of failure. Constricts with false hope, a smile plastered across your lips pretending this time it will be different.

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The healer says not to repress the memory. The more I block it, the more I’ll remain out of flow. The therapist asks me how I felt, and I tell her about Maya’s face in the back seat next to me when my father punched the steering wheel. Her eyes yanked open, paralyzed with fright, yet her lips still mouthed the screaming lyrics in her fat padded headphones. When my parents dropped me off at the campus, refused to say goodbye, it was her beautiful face resting on her elbow that left me last, staring at me from the back windshield as they pulled off and melted into the dark. Her eyes rolled away from mine and up to the silver-studded sky, the lyrics still in her mouth.

“Thank you for sharing that with me. Now, answer the question.”

“What question?”

“Oh, God… I’ll never forgive you!”

“Viola!”

“The car went over the rail. The car went over the rail!”

At night sometimes, I hear my sister say these words. Instead of yelling them into the phone, she’s singing them to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” I tell the healer and the therapist on my separate visits, and they both sigh a little. I like to think that they are singing this happy tune in their heads, but they sell me a crystal and a prescription, respectively, and ramble the instructions.

My mother sat us girls down at the kitchen table, and we watched her small, dry hands glide over paper; the magic in her hands forming it, fold by meticulous fold, into an intricate little boat. We took them to the creek behind the house and watched them drift among the whisperings of bent willows and creeping vines. Our toes were wet with mud. Mom tucked dandelions in the coarse tendrils of our hair. A happiness like that. As if the nerve endings were perpetually skipping.

Inside my studio is one tiny origami boat in an obscure corner of a table, surrounded by paper clips and pens and desktop clutter. It’s pale blue. The disintegrating folds are dirty and the corners dull. Viola made it for me eight years ago as I lay in bed, recovering from yet another mistake, and left it on the coffee table. It was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next day, and I knew she was gone.

The writer can start immediately. I upload her photo into a file with the other miscarriage portraits and glimpse the dirty blue boat again. I call Viola. When she recovers from the shock of my voice, I ask how she is, and she tells me she’s eating everyone’s dinner.

“Apparently, we aren’t as fancy as strawberries and kale salad with candied walnuts. It’s from Whole Foods and costs half a kidney. I’ve eaten too much and feel kind of shitty. How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I haven’t heard from you in over six months and all I get is ‘fine’?”

“Since when do you say ‘shitty’?”

“I love Jesus, but I curse a little. Now, answer the question for real this time. How are you?”

“Swell.”

Viola laughs. “There’s the sarcastic sister I used to know!”

I hiccup twice. I feel the rest of the hiccups gathering and preparing to fire off in watery bursts in my throat.

“What’s the matter?” The laughter has left her voice and she is serious. Judgment undulates beneath her words.

I want to tell her about the baby.

“Nothing.” Hiccup. I try to play along, bring the lightness back, and speak in the nasally voice I used when we were younger and impersonating our mother. “You’re right, it has been a long time. That’s not acceptable—”

“Since when do you care about what’s acceptable?”

I hiccup again.

“Is everything okay?”

I hang up.

Viola will not call back. I touch my hand to my flat stomach, where cells split and multiply, creating this human who wants me to be its mother. I like to pretend that I don’t know why I don’t tell her about my babies, past and present, but I do.

The car went over the rail

The car went over the rail

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The car went over the rail

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

“If you had stayed at school like you were supposed to, none of this would have happened.” My father checked his speed and slowly lifted his foot from the gas pedal as he spotted a police car up ahead. “I didn’t send you away to participate in nonsense.”

“The Republican National Convention is not nonsense. Well,” I laughed, “figuratively, sure. But in the technical sense…”

“I can’t believe you’re making a joke of this,” Ma said. “You could have been in serious trouble.”

“Could have but wasn’t.”

“How can you say that? We just picked you up from jail.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter!” My father punched the steering wheel. “I didn’t come to this country for you to throw away your life!”

On campus he turned into a parking lot and pulled up to the curb. He did not get out of the car to say goodbye, and Ma tried to hide the shock on her face. She was unsuccessful. Her mouth hung open and her sparse eyebrows bent inward. My sister looked at me from the corner of one wide brown eye before slowly turning her head only somewhat then staring at the cuts she’d made in the thighs of her jeans. I shoved open the back door and walked around to the front of the car. When I knelt on the hood, high beams burrowing into the night on either side of me, I saw that my father was crying. My mom moved to open her door, but he put his hand to her arm, stopping her. They always spoke to each other in those little taps, little gestures of understanding and love. They responded with exchanged glances and grace and that foggy night; as I knelt against the hood refusing to move, I hated them. I hated their sacrifice. I hated their love. I hated everything I was supposed to be because of them.

“Okay,” I said finally, and slid off the car. “I’ll go.”

On his first day of class, Noah arrived before everyone else and told me about his baby sister, Zion. She was nine months old, with two teeth, and pulled up on his legs, grabbing at the back of his knees where the jeans bunched a little. He told me how he’d stand perfectly still because she trusted he would not move. She trusted he would not cause her to fall.

His last class, he held the picture of the little girl jumping rope. I did not touch the photo still flat in his palms but leaned so close to it, hovered so close I could smell the lavender on his wrists beneath the sleeves. Sirens screamed outside and we both looked, forgetting the pulled shades on the windows. A can rattled every few seconds against concrete. The smell of smoke, of things burned, extinguished, trailed the sirens, permeated the small space between us. The red light above us, above the plastic bins of developer, and photos drying on a string buzzed, clicked off then on.

“It’s the best picture I’ve ever taken. Will I take another one even half as good as this?”

“Yes. You have your whole life to be better.”

He is out of the hospital now and finishing the school year at home. Kids in my photography class say Noah’s parents won’t let him leave the apartment, won’t allow anyone but family over. “They’re scared about the bullet moving. You know about the bullet, right?”

“Yes,” I say, drowning photos, avoiding their faces. “I know about the bullet.”

We were married at city hall, and your mother insisted on throwing us a wedding brunch, though it was no secret that she disapproved. I had only met her once before at a patisserie on Union Avenue. She recognized me, said, “I hear you’ve married my son,” and remarked about my freckles. She moved as if to wipe dirt from my face with one swipe of her index finger. “So many,” she frowned. “Like secrets trying to escape through your skin.”

“What did she say when you told her?” I asked a week after we got married.

“She asked if you were pregnant.”

“Because that’s the only way you’d marry…? What else?”

“Does it matter?”

“It doesn’t, but I still want to know.”

“Why?”

“Asher…”

“That I’d made a terrible mistake. That this doesn’t end well for either of us.”

In the mobile darkroom after class, I settle the images into tubs of developer. As I wait, I hear the muffled rumble of a motorcycle engine in the distance. I pull back the blackout shade on the window enough to peek outside, and there you are. You are a romantic. Life is a gesture of love and loyalty or remembrance. Every moment is a tale you live to tell our children. “I sped to your mother’s darkroom on my motorcycle—I told her I loved her. I told her I was sorry. I told her to put quarters in the meter because I’d only had one and my time was running out…”

It’s been weeks since our argument, since we inarticulately grappled with our uncertainty, and since, for the first time, you slept at your store to avoid coming home.

Beneath one of the cabinets is a boxed ream of waxed paper left over from when I rented the truck. The box is stained with grease and still smells of fried, breaded meats. I tear a six-inch sheet along the silver, perforated edge of the box. I clip my middle finger on one of the pointed teeth and a bright drop of blood rises to the tip. I suck on it until the red is gone and I am left with only the sting. I smooth the waxed paper along the counter and fold it in half, then take the top right corner and pull it to the opposite edge.

The star is complete. When you open the door to the darkroom and I see your tired face, I want to give you the good news. I want to rid the redness from your eyes. But I am only twelve weeks. I have an appointment with the doctor in three days. I am the personification of dread. If I hear a heartbeat, I will tell you. If I see our baby flourishing in its tiny sac, I will let you know the truth. But for now, you walk toward me, grinning, and all I can do is hold out my hand and offer you the paper star. I am not good at apologies. When you thank me, I look down and see a faint smudge of blood in the star’s center, in the nucleus where life begins, where its radiance ignites.

We go to your mother’s Hanukkah party. You pay the cab driver and tip him extra. He doesn’t seem to notice or care and begins to pull back into the street before your whole body is out of the car. We stand side by side, holding hands as we look at your mother’s building. “Once we get inside, beware of virgins with bourbon,” I say, and you smile, kiss my hand. Your thumb quivers against my knuckles. Inside, the buzzer makes a horrible noise and your mother’s voice crackles through a box. I haven’t been sleeping and lean against the walls of the elevator. It is old and ornate, with brass trimmings and red Persian carpet. It smells like a hundred layers of perfume.

“I’ll fix you a plate,” I say when we enter.

“Nonsense, Shirley—”

“That’s not her name, Mom.”

“He’s right, it’s not.”

She smiles, shrugs, drags you away.

I find an empty room and sit on the bench by the window. The bench is a dark rustic wood with animal carvings. Rabbits and deer, squirrels and other woodland creatures frolic in eerie, ghostlike play. I sit and take shallow breaths. This pregnancy, I am nauseous all the time but have only thrown up once. The sickness mostly lodges in my throat, expanding like a sponge, teasing my reflexes. Dry heave.

Earlier this week on the subway I read about animal pregnancies, and facts prick my brain and uterus in those idle hours: a female oyster produces more than a hundred million eggs in a spawning season, an elephant is pregnant up to twenty-two months.

Overachievers, all of them.

I am sixteen weeks, the longest I’ve ever been pregnant. You still don’t know. Too many what-ifs have staged a coup on my common sense. My toes feel cramped in heels I have worn a thousand times, and I kick them off. I’m hot. I wriggle out of my sweater and lay it across my lap. My breasts ache at the slightest touch. Hips and knees and spine feel like they’re coming unglued, wobbling at the locks and joints. In the main room, someone speaks loudly, and everyone laughs. Glasses clink. A toast.

Two weeks ago, I came home from work early with a headache that split my brain from lobe to throbbing lobe. The pain was in my eyes and in my teeth, but I refused to take even the weakest painkiller and decided on a bath. I turned the faucet in the tub and heard you, home with new clothing samples and dress forms from the store, calling my name. I set one foot into the bath and caught a glimpse of my body’s profile in the mirror. There it was, the slightest roundness in my belly, the beginning of my baby’s bump. I cupped my emerging belly at the base with both of my hands. It was stiff, firm, a fortress for this person who was both you and me.

More laughter, singing from guests in the other room. I decide once we are home, I will tell you. As I kiss your mother goodbye, she barely lets her skin touch mine, as if I might rub off on her, mess her pretty clothes.

Pristine chips of ice tap the windshield of the cab. When they catch the glimmer of streetlights and headlights, they glow like winter fireflies. Christmas is a little less than three weeks away. When we get home, I plan to turn on the lights on the Christmas tree, light the menorah and the candles we have placed in every windowsill. I will ask you to make tea and that popcorn you like. The one popped in rosemary-infused oil. I will huddle in our bedroom beneath the window, write sixteen weeks on a piece of wrapping paper, and form it into a star.

I look across the cab as you look at me. Sleet hits the window and melts, the water blurring the holiday lights, and traffic lights changing from red to green. You look younger somehow against the backdrop of the cab’s window. When you notice my staring, you hold my hand between us on the cold back seat. Our cab slows to a halt at the red light.

“What,” you ask.

“What what?”

The cars to the left of us at the intersection begin to move, their headlights bouncing as they hit uneven grooves in the road.

“You’re smiling. You seem happy right now.”

“I am happy.”

“Yeah, but truly happy. I like it.”

You hold my hand tighter.

The traffic light behind your head flips from green to yellow to red.

I lean across the back seat to kiss you and feel our cab begin to move again. I close my eyes and press my mouth to yours. Your hand is at my neck. It is soft and warm and feels like I belong with you, and you with me.

When I pull away, start to say “I love you,” I don’t. Something is wrong. You are looking not at me but beyond me, eyes growing wild and wide. Your face is bright with light and becoming brighter, and as you lunge to grab and pull me to you, I see in the window’s reflection what you see: two white cones of light from a car speeding through the red light and barreling through the intersection toward us. I try to form the word Stop! but it is too late. All the light is gone.

The car went over the rail

The car went over the rail

Hi-ho, the derry-o

The car went over the rail

Metal charging full speed into metal is a wretched sound. It is deep and ominous and everywhere, and I will later wonder if this is what my parents and sister heard as their car was struck and flung into that black water. I open my eyes and a man pounds at the window with a balled and gloved fist. He jostles the handle of my car door but can’t get it open. Part of my door is crushed inward; my leg is scratched to hell. The windshield and the passenger-side window are shattered. It smells of motor oil and fumes. Somewhere, a horn groans in one long, steady note.

I feel like I’ve been beaten all over. My neck and back hurt. My arm where you grabbed me is tender, and within a day or two the skin beneath my shoulders will swirl in colors of black, blue, and green. Hurried footsteps crunch across broken glass outside. Rapid chatter bounces within the thickening crowd. You slowly lean yourself upright. The backdrop behind your head is still sprinkled with ice, lights still switch from this to that, only now the left side of your face is crisscrossed with gashes and your head is bleeding. When I move to reach for you, my arm brushes against the budding bump I had forgotten. The baby. You are still not fully up, still not fully aware, and I place my hands on my belly. Red and blue lights spin and bounce in the distance. I close my eyes, take deep breaths to keep calm. Hold on, kid. They’re coming. We’re going to be okay.

I open my eyes and you are conscious, alert, and watching me.

“No,” you say. “No!”

Three men outside have managed to pull open your door, and you bolt from the car.

“Stop,” a man at your door says to me as he sees me clutching my stomach and trying to get out. “Are you pregnant? The ambulance is on its way.”

That’s when I hear the wailing. The man at the door whips his head around and curses. Arms are held high with phones recording some horror. I struggle to find what they are looking at through the smashed windshield and past the cab driver’s head.

I scoot across the seat and the man finally moves. When I get out of the car, my mind is swimming. Each thought is incoherent and incomplete. I am not okay, I am dizzy, but I can tell that the man ripping another man from the busted black Mercedes spun out in the middle of the intersection is you. When you slam him against the car, I run. My scraped leg burns with pain. My stomach.

Your face is ugly when you and Jameson arrive at the hospital. Erika sits beside me and covers her mouth when she sees you, busted and swollen. I grimace from my hospital bed, where I lie in an obtuse angle, hooked to contraptions with wires taped over my emerging belly. “Monitoring,” doctors say without regarding you, and leave the sound on for me to hear the gallop of our baby’s heart.

“Turn it up,” I say, and they do.

“How is the baby?” you say.

“Good. Really good.”

“How far…”

“Sixteen weeks.”

“My God. When are you due?”

“May twenty-fourth.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I love you… What’s that face? I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“But you did. You did lie.”

A week and a half after Jameson sprung you from a holding cell and I have been released from the hospital, the sound of metal on metal branded in my memory wakes me in the middle of the night. I know that it was only a dream or a nightmare or some other piece of subconscious fiction, but I still wake in alarm. I take one deep breath, then another. Your arm rests across my body. Your father’s face is one of many that look up at me from your tattooed sleeve. It is 3:00 a.m. I won’t fall back asleep. I never do.

4:43 a.m. I don’t feel right. A wave of nausea pulses through me and nudges me from that stream-of-consciousness rambling the mind engages when it knows it should be quiet. I am thinking of the salad I made for lunch, how I should not have put the cashews in with the greens. By noon they will have lost their crunch and be gummy between my teeth. I think of my shoot next week with two restaurants in Greenpoint and another in the West Village. One had Moroccan tiled floors of orange and blue and white in a complicated pattern that reminded me of parasols and lace. The frames on the bathroom mirrors were covered in gold foil. And I think of the beach, where Viola and I floated on our backs in the ocean as my father helped eight-year-old Maya build a sand castle and my mother twirled the strings of her hat that tied beneath her chin. Water tickled her toes on the shore. It was our first vacation. We drove to Ocean City, Maryland, and my parents were so proud. At night, we’d make a bonfire, lie in the sand, and watch the stars. The sleepaway camp to which I’d gotten a scholarship was in Washington, D.C. They were going to drop me off on their way back home, and I hiccupped half to death the night before we left. “Whenever you get lonely,” Viola said, “just look for us in the stars. Me and Maya, and Daddy and Ma will be right there.”

That’s what I am thinking when my water breaks and I go into labor, of me and my sister at night on the seashore, water and sand gliding beneath our feet.

My lower half is soaked in liquid warmth, like I have pissed the bed and am too ashamed to call for help. When I finally manage to swing each leg out of bed and stand, the sheets are soaked to the mattress in a watery pink-and-brown mess. I feel like I have to go to the bathroom—I know what this means. I shuffle to the bathroom, gripping my nightshirt, holding my breath, and run water in the tub.

“Hey.” You stand in the doorway, face scrunched and squinting with sleep, braving the light with terror. Your hand is held just above your eyes, fingers bent and spread like window blinds, slats to peer through. “What’s going on?” you say.

“We’re about to meet our baby.”

“But you’re only eighteen weeks. It isn’t time.”

I nod. “It is, Asher. I think it is.”

Your face crumples and you hold me while a contraction rips through my core. We cry. You sob into my neck, gasping, squeezing me to you and rubbing my back as my tears soak your bare chest, nails claw your sides. My legs buckle and you hold me up.

You hold me up.

You hold me up.

I fall apart.

I vomit.

You hold me up.

The wave of pain passes, and we undress. You smooth your hands down each of my cheeks as if reading my face. You kiss them. You kiss my forehead and cheeks. I love you. I love you, I love you. I repeat it. I don’t know if it is aloud or in my head. This wailing in my head: I love you. We cannot let the baby go. We must let the baby go. We cannot. I cannot. I cannot. I must. Naked, we step into the bathwater. I sit between your legs and begin to push. My hands in yours, fingers entwined. Grunt, cry, push. No! Squeeze my legs together. Ripping, ripping. Grunt, cry, push. No! Squeeze my legs together. Baby please don’t go. Squeeze my legs together. Please don’t go. But I cannot keep her, she has to go. Push. No. No! Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, legs together, please don’t go. But I cannot keep her, I cannot keep her, she has to go. Legs splay, legs squeeze, legs splay, legs squeeze.

“Please don’t go! Please don’t go!” Squeeze. “Asher, please don’t let her go.”

Maya had a boyfriend that our parents didn’t know about. At the funeral, he grabbed my arm when I walked by. Eyes red and welling, he said nothing. Only squeezed, squeezed to bruise, before dropping my arm again. What she must have told him. He stood by a tree away from everyone else at the gravesite, ripping innocent chunks of bark from the trunk and chucking them at the ground.

After, the news reporters asked: How are you doing? What’s next for you? You were recently arrested in New York, is that why your parents were there? Weren’t they coming back from picking you up when the accident happened? Did you know that after the truck driver found out he’d killed a family, he attempted suicide?

The woman with Viola was her roommate, the one who had taken the phone as Viola screamed at me while I was at a party, unaware, after my family had gone. The woman told me my family was in an accident and I needed to come home. At the funeral, she shooed the reporters away from Viola. Followed her around like an insecure kitten waiting to be stroked. They slept in my parents’ room, on the pillows that still curved to the indent of my parents’ heads, and the next morning at breakfast the woman plucked from Viola’s shoulder a strand of my mother’s hair.

We bury our daughter, Ellis.

We are beneath large trees whose old chipped trunks stretch into bare branches that greet the slate-gray sky. Their jealous roots creep out through the soil and grass. Jameson and Erika are with us. They are the only two invited, though neither of them knew I was pregnant. But Erika sat in the hospital with me for days, and they came to the ER after I delivered Ellis.

Ellis. She was a once-living thing with a heartbeat, and I saw her, felt her perfect tininess as I cupped her in the palms of my hands, as you cupped her. She was almost weightless, and you sat in the tub staring into the water, where your hands kept her because you didn’t want your stillborn daughter to get cold. I had gone to fetch something to wrap her in and came back with a blanket that belonged to my father. “Are you sure?” you asked. “I’m sure,” I said, and then blood spilled down my legs.

The groundskeepers shovel dirt on her like a secret I am too weak to carry. You go alone to the hospital to pick up an envelope at the main desk of the maternity ward. Inside the envelope are the few things about our daughter that we will ever know. Like the circumference of her head, the length of her body, how the lines of her footprints and fingerprints swirl. But you come home with nothing. “I couldn’t,” you say, and lumber to the bedroom, loosening your tie.

You yell into the phone at your store, “Why didn’t you tell me? How could you not tell me?”

The music is too loud and you mutter about The Metamorphosis and the trash, and digging through the trash, and fuck it because it doesn’t matter because “you broke us, you broke us, you fucking broke us.” And you don’t hear me choking on guilt and nicotine because you’re yelling and then she’s talking, so you stop, and I hear her. I hear Jill say she found it.

“Garbageman… block… chased… Meta—sis… torn… okay.” And you breathe. You breathe so soft into the phone the way you once breathed into my neck, into my face and hair. And then you break, and I hear her. “Yes,” she says. “It’s all right,” flutters from her soft pink mouth.

I see Ellis every night. Sometimes she is in my dreams, a fully developed fetus tumbling in the bounds of my expanding uterus. She stretches and kicks, alive. I am one of the lucky ones. I am a planet. She is getting too big, growing beyond the shelter that I can provide, and she pushes with her little foot. You see the outline of heel and toes on the expanse of skin above my sore, clicking hip.

Sometimes she is a little girl. Her hair is curly and dark, pulled back into one ponytail puff of ringlets and coarse swirls. She prefers rompers to dresses, and a pink toy hammer is her favorite. She hammers the plant pots in the living room, the wooden cabinet doors of a bureau in the hall. The hammer squeaks as she pounds it, and my daughter squeaks too. We take long walks to the library or to the park and buy croissants on the way home. She likes almond the best with lots of confectioners’ sugar. She takes big bites and her lips are powdered with white. When we stop at your store, you place fedoras and newsboy caps on her head, a bow tie around her neck. She sits in the leather chair with one of your WORDS FOR EVERY MAN books and pretends to read. Her dark eyes jump and skip across the letters.

And sometimes Ellis is a monster. Sometimes she is that translucent creature of paper-thin skin in the bloodied bathwater. She slithers from between my reluctant legs and her winding blue veins are the road map to death, that place with which she is already well acquainted. Where is that Ellis, the one we buried? Is she a wee fox in the woods, as you like to think, playful and toppling over sticks and moss and katydids? Is she a star, burning bright with rage, burning bright with love? Does she know that I love her? Does she find her sibling? Her grandparents and aunt?

Or is she alone? Is she afraid of the dark?

Does she cry out for her mother?

I make plans for interviews with mothers in Dallas, St. Louis, and Richmond. The writer and I work on a production schedule, a script outline, a budget, and an interview/shot list. I contract sound and camera people in each city. One sound, two camera, and already the money is low. My stomach hurts. I write and send emails, Dear Investor… On the phone, the mothers all say some version of the same thing about how it happened. Some version of “he/she was just,” followed by an ordinary, everyday thing. Walking. Standing. Playing. Some ordinary, everyday thing.

SHOT LIST

PRODUCTION TITLE:TBD DALLAS, TX — MOTHER: TONYA

On your one Saturday off a month, weeks after the New Year, as we watch a chess match in the park and wait our turn to play, I see a woman coming toward us and, as she gets closer, I realize that it is Jill. I see her before you do. She is longer and prettier than I remember. I step back, away from the game we are watching, enough so that it is impossible for her not to notice me, and I say hello. You look up from the game, smiling. When you see her, your face falls and your thumb begins to twitch. I ask her about the store, and she tells me she resigned to help a friend start a business in L.A. “Didn’t Asher tell you?” No, no you didn’t. You come over. “Hello. How are you?” “Very well, thanks.” So polite.

“You didn’t tell me she quit,” I say from the bathroom, flossing my teeth.

“It didn’t seem important.” You are already in bed, reading. “I didn’t think about it much. People quit jobs all the time.”

“She wasn’t there long.”

“It happens.”

In the doorway now. “Did something happen to make her quit?”

“I thought she told you.” You don’t look up. “Her friend is starting a company or something.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

You look at me now. “What?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“Of course not.”

“But you wanted to.” I climb into bed and lie down, settling under the covers. My light is out. “You wanted to sleep with her.”

“She’s a pretty girl.”

“No, then.”

You drop your book in your lap, keeping the page with your thumb. “I’m opening another store. In the city,” you say, and I sit up, shaking the bed. “I meant to tell you—”

“No, you didn’t.”

“You’re probably right. I didn’t. But isn’t that what we do now, though, just whatever the hell we want?”

“That’s really what you think.”

“You don’t say much, so I don’t know what to think.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“No.”

“But you wanted to.”

“Yes! I wanted to, but I didn’t because I love you. I love us! I was upset and she hugged me. She kissed my neck and I told her no and stepped back. She tried again and I fired her, okay. I’m opening another store. But don’t worry, I’ve got investors and I’ve taken out a small loan on my own. Now you know everything. Do you feel better? Are you happy?”

You slam your book on the nightstand and bump the squat glass of water sitting on the edge; it topples, hits the hardwood floor, and breaks. “Fuck,” you whisper, hold your face in your hands. Your back is turned. It is blotchy and red, with raised welts I have not seen in years. You got them when the storefront next to yours caught fire and nearly ended things. The lights are off except for the exposed bulb at your left. You put your feet on the floor, and glass crunches beneath them. You walk to the bathroom and shut the door. A faint trail of blood follows from the soles of your feet.

I stop production on the documentary, tell the writer to hold off, and take pictures of nonessentials: pigeons shitting from power lines, a stout woman exiting the Canal Street station in a ratty faux fur and Jordans, a soggy napkin on the sidewalk with a phone number in thick smeared ink. I get calls and emails for jobs but don’t return them. I eat ramen noodles, the eighteen-cent kind.

You leave for work, and I smoke a cigarette from an old pack taped under the bed for emergencies. I open the nightstand drawer where I keep the nonessential photos, and only allow my toes to graze the floor. I exhale and pluck one from the bunch. I remove the cigarette from my mouth and press the lit end into the photo’s center. It bubbles and chars, crackles in the blue flame, black smoke. It collapses inward, crumples into a mangled fist.

Walking home from the subway at night, I make the mistake of looking at myself in a restaurant window. I am messy-haired, wrinkled, and mismatched. Puffy-eyed and parched. I’ve met this version of me before. I do not like her. She refuses to leave the house in the daytime, to go outside where people can see her in the light and point and remind her that it’s her fault. She waits until nighttime, for the parties, for the hell of it, and wakes up in strangers’ beds. Her coke-nose bleeds. Her thighs are bruised. She would give anything to be bent over a dirty sofa, eyes glazed and catatonic beneath some man curved against her ass and back, and pumping clumsily into her body. Look away, she’d say to herself as he’d reach around and squeeze her hard brown nipples. And so she would look away.

There were the DJs and the spoken-word poets in stockrooms and bathrooms and parked cars. The one with loose cartilage from the gauges he’d removed, and with each thrust his hanging, hollowed earlobes would swing. There was the sophomore guy who couldn’t get hard unless he shoved my face into the mattress or carpet, and the one who always came on my chest. And there was Jameson. We took Polaroids in nearly every position, then burned them one by one in the cracked bathroom sink. Sometimes, the way he’d look at me after, I’d want to scream, Don’t you dare fucking love me! And I would once again be gone.

I stand in the window and see her, that old self, next to me. I see her tell you in your back office those years ago, tape stuck to her mouth, “I’m not the ‘I love you’ type, but I want to be.” I want to be. Before, before. We are no longer before. I see her next to me. I sit on the ground, my back to that window, and feel her next to me. Her breath is warm from liquor, soul hard as bone. Before, before. I am not before. I call the therapist. Tomorrow at ten, yes.

Yes.

The therapist asks how I felt that night.

I told her I walked off campus and to a party when they drove away. Inside, the house reeked of cheap spilled beer and liquor and weed. I was drunk. My phone buzzed in my back pocket. Viola. I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture, and the guy from biology, the one with the too-big fake diamond earring who had those wide, smiling eyes, confident eyes, touched me at my hip to pass by in the crowded living room where everyone danced. Jameson. Sober. We’d never spoken and pretended not to notice each other. The buzzing again. Viola. This time I answered. The house was loud, and I moved toward the door.

“Where are you?!”

“Chill out, Viola. Why are you—”

“Are Mom and Dad with you? Please tell me they’re with you!”

“No, they left hours ago.”

“Oh, my God! Oh, God… I’ll never forgive you!”

“Viola!”

“The car went over the rail. It went over the rail…”

“What?” I was shouting into the phone. I could barely hear her. “Viola? What about a car?”

“Hello?” A different voice.

“Yes,” I said, panicked. “Who is this? What is going on?”

“This is Michelle, Viola’s roommate.”

“Okay?”

“There’s been an accident. Your family was in an accident. You should come home.”

“What are you saying?” Blood thudded in my ears. Viola wailed. “They’re okay, right? My mom and dad are okay?”

“No. They’re not okay.” Now she too was crying. “Please, come home.”

I hung up the phone. The bodies in front of me were a muted blur of slow-moving colors and parts. The music slowed in my brain, each note and thump of bass dragged out into infinity. People were looking at me. Had the screams I heard from Viola actually been mine? Was I crying? Did I seem wasted out of my mind?

I stumbled to the kitchen, passed two couples making out against a wall, a blunt passed and sucked between three separate pairs of lips, moaning and giggling from the bathroom. The lights were set to dim. Through the window, I could see Jameson alone outside on the deck. I went out to meet him. I didn’t have a car, but I knew he did.

I asked him to take me home.

“How did you feel?” the therapist says. Pressing, pressing. Her voice is stern.

My father cried. Yes, I told her that before, that as I kneeled on the hood of the car, I saw him cry. What I didn’t tell her before was that I thought it was the first time I’d seen it, but it was the second. The first time: my father and I in the park, wide lawn, first thing in the morning. I couldn’t sleep that night and he was up at the kitchen table, beneath the burning bulbs hanging from a cheap silver chandelier, looking through papers with a pencil in one hand and a calculator at the other. It was still dark out and he set me, six years old, in front of the stereo speakers with headphones on, and put on the Muppets record. When the sun came up, I said, “It’s pink outside,” and he told me to put on my shoes. And in the park, wide lawn, first thing in the morning, the grass was still wet. Insects crawled with their dew-slicked backs, sun filtering through iridescent wings. We sat on the lawn and he plucked a blade, wiped it dry, put it to his lips, and made the grass whistle. He showed me how, and when I finally got it, he lifted me, held me by both hands and spun me in my flimsy nightgown and sneakers. Spinning. The two of us. In his eyes, happy wet and shiny things.

“How did you feel? How did you feel?”

“I told you!”

“You haven’t told me anything but facts. Feelings are not facts. I’ve watched you dance around, talk close to certain emotions without expressing any.”

“If feelings aren’t facts, then how important could they be? They don’t change anything. They don’t bring them back. They don’t make my husband hate me any less. They don’t make my sister hate me any less.”

I am standing now and my chest hurts. I ball my hand into a fist and strike it one time against my sweater, right between my breasts, and hold it there. The therapist stands too, slow, and I close my eyes, feel my body teeter back and forth from one foot to the other. I squeeze my eyelids so tight it hurts, then snap them open again. I hold my breath.

The therapist reaches out her hand but doesn’t touch me. “No matter how much you push, or how fast you run, your emotions will always be there. You are trying so hard not to let them control you; however, they have been controlling you this whole time. As much as you think that what you do is up to you, this fear of your emotions is calling the shots.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Fucking NO!” I scream, and burst through her office door, into the lobby, into the hall, into the street. Noise, so much fucking noise, and I can breathe again. My face is wet, and I wipe it with both hands, up and down like when I scrubbed at my freckles in the bathroom mirror. I wipe the wet, wipe it all away.

I meet Erika for tapas and drinks that afternoon and we talk about that one time at our apartment, sometime when our infertility woes were just beginning, and the four of us finished five bottles of wine. I pulled up a recording of the instrumental version of “Paid in Full” on my laptop. You and Jameson took shots of something brown and, in your inebriated haze, held a freestyle battle about underperforming semen while Erika and I lost ourselves in laughter, dancing, getting high, and spilling wine on the floor.

“There’s always my old place in Harlem,” Erika says, careful, laying a napkin across her slim lap. “You know we rent it out, but no one will be there for another three weeks if you need to get away. Think things through.” She calls for the waiter. The Pellegrino is flat.

Later, I stand in line at a bodega waiting for the old woman in front of me counting her change so that I can pay for razors and Pez. I haven’t seen the candy in years. The head is a pink rabbit with ridiculous lashes already rubbing off. It costs four dollars. A white cat jumps from a ledge of cereal boxes and the old lady drops her dimes and quarters. Needs to start over. It is almost sunset. I sneeze, bless you, thank you, she continues counting, and when I look up, through the window, through the bars, on the sidewalk, is Noah.

We didn’t have any place to go in mind. All he wanted was to take pictures and asked if I had my camera. Of course. Would I mind if he used it? His parents had gotten him a digital point and shoot, but it isn’t as satisfying, he says, especially when he never leaves the apartment. The real magic is in the darkroom, hands in the water beneath those red lights, and could we take a few photos and develop them together. His parents do not know he is out. They are working and Zion is with a neighbor. I still think we must move fast. I look at his chest. The bullet is somewhere near his heart. The voice-over on the news said it once when Noah’s mother wouldn’t speak. I touch it, his chest, through his jacket and hoodie because it is cold, it is February, and the wind won’t settle down. He smiles a little but doesn’t move. He is thinner. He tells me it’s okay and adjusts his glasses. He tells me not to be afraid.

Throwing Pez in the air and catching them in my mouth. He teaches me how to do this as we walk and skip down the street. I keep missing. The candy hits my chin and eye and neck. People stare, irritated, and bump into me with little regard. “Fucking watch it,” they say as I topple back and forth, to this side and that. The camera is around his neck and he laughs, shy and lowering his face, between clicks, taking pictures of me, mouth agape and missing; pictures of the older man in a navy peacoat and long braided hair, a lace shawl draped around his shoulders; of the teenagers, in ripped jeans and old T-shirts, on skateboards; of the woman in the brown turtleneck at the corner, checking her phone and scratching beneath her eye; the Black men kissing, holding each other’s faces and arms; the girl in sunglasses too big for her face lighting a cigarette; the two of us in a storefront window, several feet apart. I don’t know why we’re laughing, but we can’t stop. The world is blue and blurry, wobbling it seems. The wind still whips around us, yet we are warm. I touch his face, palm to cheek, and it is smooth. Buzzing. Now the candy is gone. He keeps the bunny in his pocket. I look at the sky. Of course—blue hour. He asks what that means. Light is evenly diffused and appears blue, I say. Happens just after sunset or before sunrise. He says it’s perfect, takes a photo of his hand against the sky. In the mobile darkroom we develop the photos, and I try to move fast so he doesn’t have to. I think of the bullet. Migrating, the voice-over said. I want to cry but refuse. I check the time. 7:24. I try to move fast, and again he tells me not to be afraid. He isn’t afraid. I tell him he needs to go, and give him a wet photo, the one with the navy peacoat and shawl. The man sits on a concrete slab near a schoolyard, legs crossed, brown ankles peeking out beneath closely cropped pants. His thin mustache is black, and lips parted to show only the beginning of his rotten front teeth. He nods because he too is not afraid.

I sit in the lobby, in those scratchy, olive-colored chairs. It must seem like an inoffensive color, olive. Something that won’t trigger chaos in the brain and send our bruised souls into fits while waiting.

Noah has gone home, and I came straight here, to the therapist. I know that she works late on Thursdays. She said it once, and I wondered if that information was safe for her to share. It reminded me of that movie with the doctor who wore a clown nose, and a patient found their psychologist’s home and showed up at the door. Sneak attack. A lot like this one; my chaos triggered. My bruised soul and Noah’s bruised heart. The therapist doesn’t know I’m here. My hands shake. They won’t stop shaking. My face is wet. It’s been wet for blocks. I can’t… I can’t stop it. Seeing him like that. A joy like that. An effortless existence. As soon as he left, my face was wet. I didn’t see, I didn’t know where I was going, but I closed the mobile darkroom and started walking and wiping my face and walking, and my mind was a black scribble, scribble, chaotic scribble and then I was here. Sneak attack, like the patient from the movie. And I’ve been sitting here in the lobby, in front of the glass doors. Sitting here for at least an hour, wiping my face up and down and up and down, and it’s still wet. Wiping my face until I hear her voice. When did the glass door open? When did she appear?

“Noah,” I say, burying my face and hands in my lap, holding myself together tight like her rubber-band ball. “On the street. He was just there and…we were together and…”

The therapist kneels in front of me. I can smell her, like tangerines. She touches my head, my shoulder. “How did seeing Noah make you feel? How did it feel in your body?”

“Like blades,” I say. “Over and over and over and everywhere they are in me, hurting me, gutting me, because it’s my fault, all of them are my fault, and don’t I deserve to feel this way? To feel the blades? Because I kill them all, I lose them all, and how could I deserve a family after spending all my life wrecking them? I don’t deserve anything good.” I say nothing else. There is nothing left to say.

I teeter between sleep and wake. The clonazepam I’ve been prescribed makes me tired, takes over my brain, and wipes it clean. The doctor said it was to take the edge off. It is more unsettling than relaxing to be so unaware.

I need to get up.

It’s been one long day, or maybe it has been three. I don’t know. My muscles and my bones are tired, useless. You come home from the store and see me in the same spot of the bed you left me in. You ask if I would like a bath. No, I wouldn’t. You are trying to pretend you do not smell the musty, stale stench emanating from my body, from my T-shirt that has lived through layers of sweat. I do not want to be clean. I do not want to hide behind jokes and sarcasm. I do not want to hide. I want to feel the filth, endure it. But for how long? How deep can I sink before that old version of myself is at the bottom right next to me, before we are one and the same?

I wake, bathed in sweat. Another day? Four? My mouth is dry, tongue thick and chalky. You sit shirtless on the wooden bench at the foot of our bed and tying your shoes. I turn over from my side to my back. My hair is caught beneath my shoulder, and I pull it across my chest. God, the smell. Like bad breath and armpits. It is snowing, and you say it has been for days.

The little things I’ve failed to notice.

I used to know all our details. The morning you proposed, it was before dawn, like this, and the radio alarm had switched on; some electronic music and a girl with a breathy, silvery voice. The sun began to rise and cast rose-gold slivers across our sleepy eyes. “Marry me,” you’d said, and I’d said, “Let’s go.”

I am aware that someone else is in the apartment. The smell of perfume. Flowers. You’re talking in the voice you unintentionally use when you need to impress. It is lower and strangely formal. You hate it. I take another pill and wait for emptiness to spill across my brain.

“It’s time to get up.”

The backs of my eyes flip from black to red. What is happening? Why is there so much light? And then I remember that our cleaning lady has probably arrived.

I peel open one eye and it floods with sun. I squeeze it shut.

“Please, close the drapes,” I mutter, and turn onto my stomach, smothering my face in the pillow. “I’m not ready. Don’t worry about our bedroom. We’ll take care of it.”

“You don’t have to be ready. But you do have to get up.”

“Please.” I push myself up on hands and knees, and then flip over so that I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. “You don’t have to clean this room today. I want to be left alone.”

She sits next to me. The flowery scent from the night before permeates the space between us. I open my eyes and see my mother and father, Maya. I see my family. I see who I am.

“It’s time to get up,” she says.

I begin to laugh. I begin to cry.

I lay my head in my sister’s lap. My Viola, she strokes my hair.

Part II

In his last class before the shooting, Noah told me he’d made a friend who liked anime too. “He can draw and make up stories,” he said. “I like sitting in our sometimes silence.” The friend had invited him over, but Noah’s mother had to work at the last minute. She told him that he had to watch his sister and, yes, he’d also have to miss my class. His sister, she wouldn’t stop crying. She pulled up on his leg, gripped that baggy part of his jeans. Snot ran from her nose, thick and gleaming. He yanked his leg away and watched her tumble and hit her chin. The door slammed. Shrieks echoed in the walls and down the stairs.

“Is she alone?”

“No.”

“Who is with her?”

“I went back and took her to a neighbor.”

“Noah…”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“He smells like the air right before it rains.”

“What? Who does?”

“Him.”

And for the first time I noticed two freckles beneath his eye.

Viola makes dinner every night. A soup our mom made with a thin broth and green onions and tender slivers of beef. We eat on the couch while you are with an investor, finalizing agreements for your second store in the city. I thank Viola for the soup, and she looks up from her laptop. All day long, her work email dings. She sweeps, washes dishes, waters our too-many plants, and we offer pleasantries like penance with a thin veil of resistance in between. “Good morning. How’d you sleep? Coffee? Tea? Fruit? The weather is dreary. Yes. How long before it melts? This sweater is fine—thank you. Please, thank you. You’re welcome. That will do. I love this song. Goodnight.”

You are an only child and know nothing about siblings; the love and hatred of the responsibility of the older to the younger. All you know about the abortion is that I had one. I didn’t tell you that I drove from Boston to Pennsylvania, where Viola still lived, and surprised her with my pregnancy and appointment. Or that she screamed at me, slammed her bedroom door but let me sleep on the couch. That I woke up the next morning to her dressed and ready in the kitchen, eating oatmeal and keeping a bowl warm for me. At the clinic, somewhere in New Jersey, she refused to get out of the car. I stood in front of the sedan as the engine hummed. Her curly head barely cleared the steering wheel. The high beams were on, and she stared directly at me, fingers gripping the wheel at ten and two, shoulders bunched high beneath her ears. The rain only drizzled, yet windshield wipers kicked left and right. This familiar scene and I hit the hood just once. She jerked out of the parking space and into the road. “She’s the good one,” they’d all whispered at the funeral. And yeah, she was.

I never told Viola that it was Jameson’s. I never told you either. That we’d run into each other in Boston after college. That we went to a party and I wore that dress, the one with the low back that secretly belonged to Maya, and when I wore it I felt like she could be alive and I could be beautiful. He took me by the waist and slowly moved me to the wall, kissed me. It didn’t take long before my back was to him and he was inside. There was the familiar heaviness of not loving him in return. I could not lift my feet. Lungs sank into bowels. I turned back and saw his eyes, still hurting from loving me, and had to look away.

Viola was in the lobby when the procedure was over, and in the car was a plastic doughnut to relieve the pressure. She held me by the elbow as I lowered into the passenger seat and from her strained, tired throat she said, “Are you done now? Are you finally done?”

Viola wants to see my office. It is Friday and the building is mostly empty. I haven’t been inside in three weeks and when I open the door and see my desk with the same two books, photos taped to the wall, I realize how much I miss it. It smells like sage. Viola picks up a silver tin on my desk, smells the incense inside, and leans on the windowsill peering into tree branches scratching the glass. She lived in New York one summer in college, and says she forgot that you can’t hear the birds. You can’t even hear yourself think.

“Precisely.”

“You like the noise?”

“Silence makes me nervous.”

She opens a portfolio on my desk and flips through. “It made me nervous for a long time too. When it was quiet, I’d think of how much I blamed you. But you weren’t to blame. You aren’t.”

I tell her I want to show her something, something I once mentioned to you and your face did a peculiar thing. It opened and closed. Like removing the top slice of bread from a sandwich and watching all the guts spill out.

I open the door to the darkroom and she follows. She sucks a stream of air between her teeth and makes an inverted hissing sound. Viola is shorter than I am, petite and with a large chest she complained got in the way. She exhales through her nose. She says, “You’ve always been the talented one,” shaking her head slowly, unconsciously, scanning the room.

Photos are still clipped to a string and she points at them. I tell her they’ve been dry for weeks and are okay to touch. She unclips the one of you dancing. Erika had taken the picture one night on the boardwalk in Coney Island. In the photo, your arms are mid-flail and one knee is in the air, as if you are skipping. Your hair is longer in front than it is now and nearly reaches your chin. You are laughing, your mouth open so wide I can see the silver filling from your only cavity on the top molar all the way in the back.

“Your husband is… The two of you… I’m a little jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“You’re like”—she laughs—“champagne bubbles. Like a magical something.” She sets the photo down and starts unclipping the rest. “He called me, you know. This man I’d never met or spoken to—your husband—he called me and asked me to come. He didn’t say why. Only that you needed me, and God knows that wasn’t true.”

“Then why did you come?”

Viola shakes her head, intentional this time, and I know you told her about the babies.

I twist a key in the lock of a drawer.

“That’s not full of past lovers is it?”

“You’re so funny, I can hardly contain myself.” I lift a bag out of the drawer. “They’re negatives.” I open the bag. Viola pads across the tiny room in even steps. Her face glows red from the lights. “I haven’t felt ready to develop them.”

Viola’s hand is at my arm. Her fingers are slender like mine, or mine like hers, with our father’s bullish knuckles. “What is it?”

“My God, you still don’t trust me.”

“Trust you?”

I move my arm away and reach behind me for the bottle of developer. “Is that a question?”

“No, I… I’m not perfect, okay? I’ve worked through a lot, but trusting you…”

I pour developer into the first bin and reach back for the stop. “Do we really have to do this tired as hell dance right now?”

“I don’t know what trick you’re about to pull with these hidden negatives, what disaster you’re about to make me inherit. But you’ve gone years barely speaking to me—”

I slam down the bottle of stop after pouring, and place the negatives into the negative carrier, focus the image, and prep the paper. “You stopped talking to me! Not the other way around.”

“And now you call every six months and offer me the frivolities of your life without once telling me something real.”

“You haven’t worked through anything.” I grab tongs from a jar and slip the paper into the developer, watch the clear liquid ripple over the sheet as an image begins to break through. “You’re still pissed.” I switch the paper from the tub of developer to the tub of stop. “You’re an awful liar. I know you know about the miscarriage. You probably know about both of them, and think I’m being punished or something. I can’t have children because I got rid of one. Is that right? Is that what Jesus is telepathically communicating to you right now?”

Viola lurches toward me as I set the photo in a tub of water. “Don’t be mad at me because I didn’t spread my legs for every prick that called when Mom and Dad died. I was broken too, you know. When they died, I had nothing.”

“You had me! But I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t Maya.”

“Maya was a child!”

“And you were stuck with me. The sister you wished had gone over that bridge.”

“I love you. I love you so much I sat in the lobby of an abortion clinic so you wouldn’t have to be alone while they took a life from your insides. Do I like what you did? No. Do I get why you did it? Of course I do. But I loved you. That is what Jesus is ‘telepathically communicating’ to me. To love you.”

“Past tense.”

“What?”

“You said you loved me. Past tense.”

“Fuck you.” Viola turns on her toes and paces to the door and back again and again. “You see what I’ve reduced to? Do you see how frustrated a person can become with someone so self-involved? When are you going to open your eyes?”

But I am not listening. I lift the photo from the tub of water with the tongs, find a clip, and slowly hang it from the string to dry. Viola is still talking. In the photo, from a bird’s-eye view, my legs are crossed like a pretzel on the floor. My father’s pale-green-and-yellow blanket is a bundle in my lap. Dark spots and smears lightly stain my legs, and it takes me a moment to realize that it is blood.

Viola is quiet now and standing next to me. Our knobby hips and elbows touch, and the loose curls of her hair have entwined with my coarse ones across our shoulders.

“Is that a baby?” she whispers.

I look at the bitty creature you and I made, who exited my body with one, maybe two breaths before falling limp in our hands. You say she did not take a breath, but in my dreams she did. Her eyes are closed, and blood vessels run through her miniature self, visible through her transparent skin. You can see all the way through to her humanness, to the beginning of humanity.

“Her name was Ellis,” I say. “She made it longer than the other baby. She resembled a person. We buried her in a graveyard near the hospital. I had her in our bathtub. I wanted to be alone with her, and while Asher dressed before going to the hospital, I took this and several more. I wanted to remember our daughter, and every moment that I was a mother.”

“Oh, my sister.” Viola’s body shivers as she holds my hand. “You are a mother.”

And that would make you a father, wouldn’t it, Asher? Yes, I think it would.

The cabbie pulls into the departures side of the airport. It is snowing again. My hands are red and stiff with cold in Viola’s hands. My ears burn beneath my cap. Snow piles are shoved against curbs and frozen in dirty, mountainous sculptures against streetlamps. Black ice glazes the streets. Cars slip and slide in and out of illegal stopping zones, hazard lights flashing, horns indignant and cawing like crows. Everyone around us seems to be yelling. My hands, they won’t let go.

I take the kids back to the abandoned warehouse, but in the afternoon this time to take portraits in different light. A student looks at the wall where she’d photographed Noah. His shadow isn’t there, but it is. I call the writer and tell her I’m ready to start again. Yes, I still need money. I will find it. I will.

SHOT LIST

PRODUCTION TITLE: TBD RICHMOND, VA — MOTHER: LISA

I answer an email and take a job photographing the owner of a vintage jewelry shop. The woman is kind and likes to touch when she speaks, her hands constantly resting on my clothes. I don’t mind. I like the warmth of it. Inside the shop is a jewelry box from Toulouse. It is green and gold. Every item has a whimsical description of the person who once owned it, and the weathered note above the box says, Wrote naughty tales in the tub.

“I hope it’s a gift for yourself, dear,” the shop owner says.

It is.

The investor’s lawyer stops by the apartment with electronic documents awaiting your signature. The second store is happening regardless of what I think, regardless of you cutting me out, regardless of our dwindling accounts. We rarely touch each other anymore. You don’t read to me in this new life, one where we never want to hurt each other and understand that the hurt is inevitable. It’s what happens when you are human, and you love someone. I don’t blame you; the blame would be misplaced. I boxed it up long ago and shoved it in my chest, where it belongs. The investor’s lawyer repeats the terms, square footage, and you both look at plans, nod your heads. “Nothing matters without you,” you say when he leaves. Your voice cracks. “I don’t know if you can believe that, but it’s true.”

I meet a woman in the stairwell of my studio. She looks young, midtwenties, and wears thick clear frames with no lenses. “I just like them,” she says one day when I ask about it. “Don’t you ever do something just because you want to?”

We are a culture obsessed with outcomes.

I buy a bag of oranges to make juice; then the next morning I change my mind. “Let’s learn to juggle,” I say. You stand shirtless in front of the window in our bedroom. It is early spring and old snow thaws in the new glittering sun. You throw an orange into the air and catch it, then another, and I film on my phone. When you speed up, the oranges fall, and you tackle me to the bed. My laugh is absurd, like a dolphin’s call. Your fingers lose themselves along my body.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I’m sorry.”

The store is open, and a party at Meir seems like a good idea. You go to a costume store in Chelsea and surprise me with a rabbit head and a fox head ten times their natural size. I put on a dress, purple chiffon, the one you say makes me look like the princess in The Princess Bride, and lace up my Doc Martens. I slide the fox’s head over mine, and you become the rabbit. We stand in the mirror side by side, holding hands. We are terrifying. We are amazing. We are no longer ourselves, and more ourselves than ever before.

At the party—look at all the people we love, loving us right back.

After everyone has drunk the liquor and danced and gone, the lights are out. Streetlight streams in gold. You sit in the leather chair near the entrance, sipping water from a black-and-white-striped paper cup, and reading. You are a little drunk and squint to stop the words from swirling. Outside, a man sits on the sidewalk playing a sitar. He sings and I sit in your lap.

In June, we eat the usual: blueberry pancakes with slightly burned edges, and cider with a shot of bourbon, before you are off to interview staff for the new store. I am meeting the writer in a few hours. The documentary has resumed, potential investors in the works. You ask if I want to go with you to get a new tattoo next weekend and I say yes. You are getting a baby fox, curled and asleep in a bed of leaves on the inside of your left bicep, next to the one of Einstein with peonies in his hair. Before I get up to use the bathroom, I wipe syrup from my mouth and tell you about a new artist’s show in Greenpoint. Her chalk drawings are so raw and precise, they look like photographs. I ask if you will join me and you say, “Of course.” When I return, I stand next to you at the table, shaking and holding my fist closed tight. “Open it,” I say, and you peel my fingers back.

We hold our breath. We hold our breath. All the way to the first, second, and third sonograms; all the way through sixteen weeks, we hold our breath.

“No, listen,” the doctor says, promising me that it is true.

I hold my hands over my ears. Cover them to avoid the potential silence of my baby’s heart.

“It’s strong,” she says. “It’s incredible.”

Twenty weeks.

I turn my head on the pillow to look at you, and lower my hands to hear it. Swooosh swooosh swooosh swooosh… and I laugh. I laugh and laugh alongside the joy on your lips and streaming down your face as you stare at the monitor next to me and take my hand in yours.

“Look, babe,” you say. “You have to see our baby. You have to see with your own eyes.

I turn my head back to the doctor. “Is this real?” I say. “Is the baby really okay?”

“The baby’s really okay,” she says.

And the baby is. That little me and that little you, with heart thumping in its curled body, knees tucked while sucking its thumb.

The real estate agent enters the code and opens the front doors. Inside, we take the elevator, not the stairs, and I am grateful for the break, for not having to carry my new weight up seven flights. She presses a button on the panel, and the round disc with the number seven fills with pale light. “We live on the seventh floor,” I mouth to the baby inside me. The crocheted pattern on my dress orbits him or her like moons.

We step off the elevator. The hallway is bright with white overhead lighting and smells like hyacinth. 7E. The agent enunciates every syllable. She has a face like a bird, with delicate, bendable bones flexing beneath the surface of her waxy skin, and I wonder if she bruises easily. Her mouth stays elongated when she says the letter E. It’s stretched from cheek to cheek as if she is unable to relax the muscles, bring her mouth back to center again. When she opens the front door, she is greeted by sunlight streaming through the large front windows. Her eyelids flit like nervous wings. You squeeze my hand, enamored.

I stand in the main window. It extends about ten of the fifteen feet across and almost touches the ceiling. Outside, a woman pulls a wagon with two little girls. I don’t know their ages and I’m awful at guessing. Their hair is parted down the middle and sprouts from green barrettes in coiled Afro puffs. They look like they’re singing a song. The little one throws her head back and claps. The other bobs her head and shoulders. Her mouth moves, sings the words, but I cannot hear what they are.

The real estate agent shows us the bedroom with two closets on either side of the door. One is a miniature walk-in; the other has a single metal rail and wire hangers the previous tenant left behind. “The bathroom is on the other side of this closet,” she says, and leaves the bedroom for the hallway to show us the full bathroom. This apartment has one and a half baths. Two toilets would be a dream. The walls of the full bath are covered with white subway tile, gray grout in between. I sit on the side of the tub and run my fingers along it.

“It’s good, right?” I say.

“Hell yeah,” you mutter, high-pitched and under your breath, and I smile.

We have never lost a baby in this tub, on this floor, in this apartment. We have never lost anything here.

“Do you want to sit down?”

Erika and I are headed east on Hudson toward her favorite kids’ clothing store. She pushes Makena, who slaps her chunky hands at the black-and-white-checkered toys attached to the front of her stroller. The toys jingle as they flip and spin around the bar. Makena’s giggle is infectious, and I laugh between bites of pistachio ice cream at the gurgling sound.

“We can keep walking. It’s not too far from here, right?”

“About three blocks. Can you make it?”

“Let’s find out. What are we going here for again?”

“Mm.” Erika plops chocolate ice cream on her tongue and licks the backside of the little wooden spoon. “A dress in the most beautiful Matisse print. It’s cream with splashes of orange and blue and magenta. It’s perfect for Makena’s party.”

I look around the covered top of the stroller. Makena has removed one of her tan moccasins and chews the fringe at the top. Drool slides from the corner of her mouth and down her chin, dribbles onto the toe, and turns the spot a dark brown. She will be two in three days, and her party is in a week.

“Before I forget, are you coming to my performance on the twenty-seventh? I need to get you and Asher backstage passes if you all don’t want to wait in the lobby after.” I tell her yes and she says, “Wonderful… will you push the stroller a minute?”

I take the stroller and Erika tosses her tight auburn curls to one side before twisting them in the ponytail holder around her wrist to form a bun. A shimmer of silver strands flashes within each shake and pull through the stretched loop in her fingers. She reaches her hand across to push the stroller again, but I tell her I’ve got it, and we continue another block. I like pushing the stroller, the weight of it, knowing a baby is inside. Makena is the perfect combination of her parents, with Jameson’s rigid nose and almond-shaped eyes, Erika’s heart-shaped face and a perpetual blush in her cheeks. Freckles play across her cheeks, nose, and forehead. Some scatter along the curve of her ear. Her thick dark brown curls are tinted with auburn. I put one hand on my belly.

What are you anyway? Like a mixed breed? Like a dog?

Days after our apartment-hunting bliss, a young Black man rightfully selling DVDs in front of a store in Missouri was suffocated by a police officer while being restrained on the sidewalk. Two days later, a boy, fourteen years old, was yanked from a bus stop in Maryland for “disturbing the peace” with his rapping. Police threw him to the concrete, and when the boy fell, he cracked the back of his skull. The police left him there, unconscious and bleeding to death. A woman in her parked car across the street got it on video with her phone.

The video is everywhere, on the news, in every social media stream, but I refuse to watch it. Last night as I showered, you answered emails. You said you couldn’t bring yourself to watch the video either, but as the interviews of protesters we’d listened to all day swam in your head, you searched for the video and clicked play. You were struck, so drawn into the horror you were witnessing, you didn’t notice that the water had stopped running in the shower, that I was standing in the hall behind you in a towel, all belly and breasts, watching over your shoulder.

The boy, his name was David Bowen, wore an oversize black T-shirt and jeans. He was small for fourteen, short. You could barely see his face. The video was grainy. He wore a white baseball cap and a large silver watch on his wrist that kept catching the sun and causing a glare in the camera. The police stopped their car and stepped out. It all happened so fast. David stepped back and held his hands out to his sides, palms open. “Yes, sir. I’ll stop sir. Yes, sir. I’ll stop sir.” Mouths move, lips sputtering words. It is hard to hear. One officer grabs David by the neck of his shirt and shoves him into the glass exterior of the empty bus stop. David clutches his shoulder. The officer grabs him again, throws him to the ground. The watch on his wrist catches the sun and shoots a glare into the camera as David falls. He does not move. The camera shakes. The woman holding the phone is shaking. You can hear her suppressing hysterics and beginning to hyperventilate as she mutters beneath her breath, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

In one swift motion you hurled your laptop against the bedroom wall. You stood from the desk and, towering over the mess, the shattered screen, your body heaved. Your breath raced, uneven, and your shoulders shuddered. Spittle flicked from your lips when you exhaled, and you wiped your face and mouth with one hand. When you finally looked up, you saw me in the middle of the hall, so round, so pregnant with your Black child, and terrified of the truth: a snatching of life for fear of this skin.

Erika answers that no, she does not want more children, as she holds up the Matisse-printed dress. It is perfect for a birthday party. She is simultaneously satisfied and ashamed with her efforts and says, “Makena is enough—to be honest, she’s more than I can handle. I miss my work. And I miss not feeling guilty about wanting to be at work. What about you?”

I tell her that one is enough.

She pays for the dress, then grips both handles and regains control of the stroller, her daughter. What will life be like for her? What will life be like?

I asked you that last night.

“Can you tell me? Do you have an answer?”

“You’re upset.”

“And so are you!”

“I don’t have an answer. I don’t.”

SHOT LIST

PRODUCTION TITLE: TBD ST. LOUIS, MO — MOTHER: ROCHELLE

I check email every day, waiting to hear from David Bowen’s mother about an interview. You wish I would keep it simple, and I promise you that I can make the drive to Maryland and will do any remaining correspondence over phone or video chat. With no financial backing yet and our savings accounts dwindling, the interviews are all I have to keep the project moving. The writer has agreed to work for free until some money comes through. Video editors haven’t been as kind. Why should they be? I send more emails: Dear Investor.

Sometimes, as I lie in bed, sore hips and breasts, swollen legs hugging my body pillow, you lull the baby and me to sleep with Rilke’s letters: “So, dear Sir, I can’t give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create.”

Jameson and I sit for hours at the counter of a burger place we’ve never heard of. You and Erika both stood us up for a couples’ lunch date. Work and work. Sometimes Jameson and I go ten, twenty minutes without speaking. There is too much to express, and the best we can do to share it is to be next to each other. Neither of us has answers, so we say nothing. We are tired. Tired of listening. Tired of talking. Tired of being asked how we’re doing. Terrible, motherfucker. But that’s not an acceptable answer. PROTECT THE WHITE PEOPLE AT ALL COSTS, I joke. They want us to be acceptable. “Fuck that,” Jameson says when I tell him this dialogue in my head. “Fuck all of that.” He feels massive yet small hunched over the bar with shoulders stacked to his ears. The baby kicks hard and I jump. We laugh a little.

He orders another beer, and I order another sparkling water and a basket of hot golden fries to warrant our taking up the seats. Besides, the hour is slow, and the place is more empty than full. It is the first time we have been alone together since Boston. Jameson reaches for a handful of the still-sizzling fries the bartender slides in a basket across the counter to us. His face looks tired, older. He has been working even longer hours than usual at the firm in order to make partner. It has always been his goal. Hints have dropped that this could be his year.

“Good for you,” I say, and he smiles.

It’s funny how someone you knew when they were young can do something as simple as smile and you can see who they once were. You can see the boy on the couch at a party smoking weed with the basketball team. The boy with that stupid fake-diamond earring in biology class whom girls “accidentally” brushed their tits against when they stood next to him and touched his arm. He seemed cocky and entitled before he became something else. Something wrapped up in my self-loathing and loss.

“There’s a protest for David Bowen tomorrow night in Queens,” he says. “You going?”

“Not with this belly.” I rub my stomach. “It’s enough trying to avoid the news, so I don’t get stressed and lose this one too.”

“You’re so far along.” He sips his beer. “Aren’t you in the clear?”

“You’re never in the clear until the baby is born.” I laugh smugly. “And even after that—it’s infuriating.”

“It’s fucking genocide is what it is,” he says, staring into the plastic basket of fries and crinkled brown waxed paper. He doesn’t laugh, smugly or otherwise. “I’m going. Erika wants to come, but we can’t get a sitter on such short notice, and it’s no place for a baby.”

“It’s peaceful.”

“I don’t know this time.” His face is hard.

“Please don’t go to this thing if you can’t trust yourself to be smart about it. Think about your family.”

He turns and looks directly into my eyes, and it is the first time in years. “They’re all I think about.”

I sigh and pick at a fry, dip it into a paper cup of ketchup. “Then you should go,” I say. “Both of you should. You can bring Makena to the apartment. Asher and I will watch her.”

“Thanks. How’s the documentary coming? Erika says you’ve hired a writer.”

“I have,” I say. “But the crazy thing about making a film is that you need more people than a writer, which means you need money.”

Jameson stares at the television hanging above the bar. The screen cuts from replays of one basketball game to the next. “How much do you need?”

“Total? Twenty-five grand would be a good start. I have a fraction of that in my business account. Personally, Asher and I have some savings, but it’s for IVFs he still hopes for if this baby doesn’t make it. He hasn’t said that, but I know—”

“I’ll give you the money.”

“What? No.”

He asks the bartender to refill his beer. Foam sloshes from the top as Jameson lifts the rim to his mouth. “Girl, stop,” he says. “The money is yours. Hire whoever you need to make this thing happen.”

They asked everyone to bring books, and on the roof of Erika and Jameson’s building, surrounded by family and her parents’ friends, Makena crumples and tears the tissue paper as Jameson lifts a vintage copy of Letters to a Young Poet from the bag.

Later, she smashes her cake and happily sucks and licks icing from her fingers and palms. Her face is smeared with pink, white, and green. Vanilla cake crumbs are in her hair, her eyebrows, glued by icing to her fat cheeks. Jameson and Erika have hired a photographer and stand behind their daughter’s high chair for pictures. They have outdone themselves with balloons, the two-tiered cake for guests, flowers, linens, and liquor. Makena is beautiful in the dress and silver sandals. She kicks her legs like she is in a swing, like she is about to take flight. She grins. As Jameson lifts her up and tosses her in the air, someone cautions him. “You don’t want her throwing up on you,” they say, but Jameson doesn’t care.

I right my twisted dress around my belly as I think about the check he quietly placed in my hand as he surprised me in my studio the day after our lunch. He had never been there before. “Make it so,” he’d said, and I hugged him. The dreadlocks, hoisted askew like a thousand waving fingers on his head, lolled to the side and back. I tried to ignore the nostalgia in his grip and gaze.

I think this as I see you pushing through the rooftop door. You have been missing from the party for several minutes, and your face is washed of color. Your phone is gripped so tight in your hands, the knuckles are white.

The left side of your mother’s body suffered the most. Her lip dips from the cupid’s bow. You say that whenever you are across from her, watching her listen as you talk, or watching her bored gaze follow the television screen, you have to remind yourself that no, her skin isn’t sliding off her skull.

The apartment was ours alone for exactly one month. She lives in what was, for thirty days, the guest room, where she reads the newspaper, eats soft foods, and complains about the temperature and the day nurse. She refuses to read the paper online and so, though we had canceled our subscription two months before, you reinstated it for another year. “A full year?” “It doesn’t mean she’ll be here a year,” we said on our way to work before kissing and leaving in opposite directions at the bottom of the stoop.

Eight to twelve months, the doctor says, before she’ll regain most of the strength in her left arm and leg, before she’ll live independently again. You don’t say anything, yet I know you are calculating the months before and after birth. I am seven months pregnant. Thirty weeks. All of the numbers.

The fridge is stocked with yogurts, green juices and smoothies, and vegetable purees. I mash bananas every morning before the day nurse comes and takes your mother oatmeal. She asks if there’s anything Japanese in it and I say from the kitchen, “Oh no, just ground cats and dogs.”

Over the phone, Viola asks, “How is the monster today?”

A quiet murmur funnels through your mom’s closed door. She’s been talking in her sleep, and because she’s lived alone for more than a decade, no one knows if the behavior is new or old. We’re going on week five of her stay, and she wants to go home. She won’t say it, but she wants to go home before the baby comes. But she refuses to have a nurse with her at night. She refuses to have anyone treating her like an incapable old woman.

That night you told me that when you brought her a cup of tea, she said, “It’s a shame what’s happening to those people’s boys.”

“What are you talking about? What people’s boys?”

“You know.” Her mouth was cheerful, crooked. “You know exactly who I mean.” She paused and spread the paper open across her sheets, pointed to David Bowen’s smiling face beneath a headline. Your hand that held her mug shook. Chamomile sloshed over the mug’s mouth and splattered the inky pages.

“Luckily,” she started, “I don’t have to worry about such things. Jews, we’ve had our struggles in this country, but we’re a prosperous people. That’s what happens when you follow the rules, Asher. When you do as you’re told. You succeed. Tell me, what are you all having? A girl, or is it a boy? As if it matters. They hunt them all.”

That night you relived it. Your eyes fixed on her bent, wrinkled mouth, her cracked and pursed lips contorting around the letters in hunt. You said you saw it right then. You saw David and you saw our child. That image of David falling became our child falling. His head bangs into the concrete with such blunt force it bounces before conceding in lifeless obedience, seeping red into the weeds creeping up from the cracks. Your mother smiled. Yes sir, I’ll stop sir. Yes sir, I’ll stop sir. David said it, you saw our child say it, hands out to his sides. And you set the hot mug down on the lumpy bed, watched the hot water spill, and wished with every pulsing fiber in your angry heart that the stroke had killed her.

“First thing tomorrow, I’m calling about a live-in nurse.”

“Why? We have a day nurse.”

“Not for here, for her apartment. She’s going home.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“It’s what we need.”

Cooking dinner. I chop garlic and shallots for a red clam sauce, and you set the table. The blade is new because you have started cooking more adventurous meals (an African stew, a traditional paella while chanting “For the queen!”) and wanted a new set of knives. You tell me to be careful and slow down. “It’s red sauce, not blood sauce.” When I mock you, you catch my words like blown kisses in your hand and slather them on your face in faux ecstasy. The television is on. An old rerun. It is interrupted by a breaking news story, and I continue chopping. You are in the kitchen now, stirring the previously chopped things in a skillet of olive oil. Sometimes you miss your line-cook days and I wish I knew you then too. We are missing the interruption until at once I hear the words migrated, coma. I drop the knife’s handle and look at the television, at a picture of Noah’s face, before vomiting in the sink. All sound has gone, I cannot hear, and I slump to the floor. You slowly lower your body beside me, and I put my shaking hands out. Please, don’t. But then, please, and you pull me into your chest. Noah’s mother is on the screen, intact yet dismembered.

When I arrive at the hospital, Noah’s mother is there. I stand in the hall and watch her. She is reading from a comic book, and the photo he’d taken of the little girl jumping rope on the basketball court is on the table next to him. She makes funny sounds, changes her voice for the different characters, laughs. She stops reading to grip his shin beneath the sheet and whisper before standing to kiss her son on the mouth, to share his breath.

This is motherhood.

I take a deep breath as the doctor lifts her cool fingers from prodding and rummages in a drawer. Outside the trees are bare. Naked branches sway as the sun punctures the day. Their gold autumn leaves have abandoned them for sewers, curbsides, and the wet soles of shoes. That morning on the subway, on my way to my checkup, schoolkids sat bundled in coats and knit hats pulled over their ears, gloves peeking from their pockets. Some were nine, maybe ten years old. What had their parents, who couldn’t accompany them to school, told them before leaving the house? “Keep your eyes straight ahead. Don’t talk to anyone. Mind your own business. Be invisible.” Noah, still asleep in his hospital bed, would be in the seventh grade, riding the subway to school in a coat and hat. Any one of those children this morning could be Noah. Noah is all of them. And their parents know it.

The doctor untangles a cord, then squirts gel onto my stomach.

A healthy heart beats.

His mother speaks now, but only to the Black female reporter. Not the young one who looks like a Barbie dipped in caramel plastic coating, with perky tits where her Indian hair splays, but the shorter one. The one with the hearing aid whose voice prances in the empty space between the couch and television screen. Noah’s mother says, “I know my son is going to be all right. I rub oils into his skin in the morning, like I did when he was a baby. He always liked that. I talk to him and he talks back. If only with his breath, he talks back.”

Inside their apartment, Erika unlocks the door for me, and I let myself in. Makena naps in her new toddler bed. I ask to see her, and Erika says to go ahead, she needs to clean up a haphazard pile of books that has fallen from the bookshelf.

“What happened?”

“I’ve asked Jameson to bolt that shelf to the wall for months. I finally called someone to come out and do it, but the earliest appointment I could get was next week. So of course, Makena manages to shake the shelf today.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine.” Erika huffs. “Just a scare and a bruise on her cheek. Can you believe it—this whole bookcase could have fallen on her.” An agitated gurgle and a rustling start in Makena’s room. “Like I said, she’s scared.”

“I’ll check on her.”

Sunlight fills Makena’s room. Erika redecorated a few weeks ago. Windows consume two of the four pale blue walls. One wall is swathed in white wallpaper with cartoonish black line drawings of birds. The golden yellow curtains pool on the shag rug beneath them. Makena stirs in her bed, rubbing the red mark on her cheek. Her brown eyes are open and her wet mouth pouts, making sounds as if she is trying to pronounce the letter p: puh, puh, puh. When her face crinkles, sparse eyebrows dip into the bridge of her nose; I pick her up. It is too late, though; she cries, whimpers with annoyance. I hold her head against my shoulder, smooth her curls, and carry her back into the main room, where Erika stands. Her back is to me, head bowed.

“That was fast,” I say, but when I come closer to the room, the books are still on the floor.

She doesn’t move. “What is this?”

“What is what? I can’t see what you’re talking about.”

Erika turns now, head still bowed as she glares at the Polaroid between her slim, trembling fingers. Finally, she looks up at me, confused, enraged, then turns the Polaroid around and holds it in front of my face. And there I am. Twenty-two on a dirty dorm room floor. Naked in Jameson’s lap.

Three days later, when I stop by the bank to cash his check, it doesn’t clear. “Stop payment,” the teller says. “You can’t cash it.”

The email from David’s mother: No, I am not available for an interview. Do not contact me again.

I visit Noah at the hospital. I wonder who has put his mother’s photo there, on the side table next to the bed. Her name is Cynthia. She wouldn’t have done it herself. Probably a family member who thought he’d want to see his mother when he finally wakes up. A thick ribbed tube is plunged between his gray lips and taped to his face. He is a little dry and his hair is uncombed. His mother hasn’t been here yet, and I take the tiny vial of lavender oil from my bag and squeeze a single drop onto the inside of his right wrist. I touch him softly with three fingertips, rub the oil into his skin, into the bend of his wrist where lines crisscross like rope, like a braid. I rub in a circle until the oil is gone then rest my fingers there.

I comb his hair and when his finger jumps, I stop. I wait. It jumps again. When his eyelid twitches, his eyes skittering beneath them, I drop the comb and back away. The word nurse catches in my tight and eager throat until I force it through my choking disquiet. I clutch my belly and rush down the hall. The baby kicks and kicks and kicks.

I grab the first doctor I see by the arm. “Something’s happening,” I shout. I am shaking with a violence so unreal to me that the doctor’s face is panicked, streaked with red.

“Are you having contractions?”

“No! It’s Noah! Something’s happening. He’s moving. He moved his finger, and his eyes are… He’s waking up!” I am crying, taste the salt on my teeth. “Damn it—he’s waking up!”

But the doctor is gone now. Running in the bright hall. His brown hair bouncing. His white coat flowing behind him like a cape. A nurse at the other end takes off running behind him, clutching a stethoscope at her neck. Another says to me, “Is there someone we can call for you?” because I am still shaking, holding on to my belly. When I tell her no, she guides me to the waiting room and offers me a paper cup of water as I sit.

“I’m Cate,” she says in a low voice. “What is your name?”

“I’m his cousin,” I say.

“Okay. Well, we’ll take care of Noah and let you know what’s happening as soon as we know. How does that sound?”

“That’s fine.”

“If you need anything, just call me.”

Noah’s mother arrives an hour later. She wears a long, belted wool sweater the color of oatmeal and cinnamon. Her hair is natural, thick, and secured in a puff at the top of her head. Before she can speak, a nurse is at her side; they rush toward Noah’s room together. It is morning. Cate brings me crackers and tells me that Noah’s mother, my aunt, maybe, is here and asks if I would like to see her; and when I begin to shake again, I push past Cate and move as quickly as my body will carry me out the doors.

She smokes. Or at least she is smoking now. Noah’s mother stands on the curb outside the hospital, one arm wrapped across her body as her opposite elbow rests, bent, against it; a cigarette between her fingers in the gray early afternoon. Her expression is neutral. I leave money on the table of the coffee shop where I sit, and step onto the sidewalk. Cars stop and start. Traffic. I stand exactly opposite from her, yet she does not notice. I take my camera from my bag, raise it to my face, zoom. Noah. I see him in her thin forehead and broad, sweeping lashes. I see him in her slender neck. The cigarette isn’t lit.

The comfort of old habits. I take her picture.

When she begins to walk east, I walk east with her. Checking every few seconds to see if she has turned, hopped into a cab, trotted into the mouth of a subway station. I am surprised that I am able to keep up. At the crosswalk she doesn’t try to beat the light. For a moment, she lowers her head and covers her eyes with one hand. When she lifts her face, she squints. I lift my own head to the clouds, feel the drizzle. I look back and she is walking again. I cross the street, and as soon as I am only yards behind her, she turns right and disappears into the subway. I go. I go with Noah’s mother. I take her picture as she enters the turnstile. I take her picture as she enters the subway, then rush in behind. It is mostly empty, and I sit behind her. I shake because my body does not know what else to do. I want to ask her questions. I want to know. I want her to know. She smells like her son.

Her head lolls to one side in a graceful swoop, and in that mostly empty train car Noah’s mother releases a haunting, hollow groan into her shoulder. She does not muffle the sound, does not hide. Again and again, she lets go until two Black women leave their seats across the train car to check on her. Trepidation surrounds them, and I hear one of them say, “…that boy’s mother…”

Before they can notice me, I stand and move in the opposite direction. They sit next to and across from her. These strangers, they absorb the sounds wrenched from her body and luring us impossibly close to her soul. The subway stops at DeKalb Avenue. Before I get off, I take their picture.

Since week thirty-six, I have been thinking about the mares and foals I saw in a documentary. The licking and saying hello at birth, this ritual indicating you are mine, you are mine. How my own mother told me that after she’d pushed me into the world, and the doctor scooped me and raised me above their weary, glistening heads, my father shouted, “A girl, a girl! I am blessed with another girl!” I tell the therapist this, and I laugh and cry at these bits of happiness strung together with spit and silk in my memory. I tell you, and you ask me what other good things I remember. You pull out your phone and we both record our stories, create something like wisdom, like art.

Do you remember what you did after we got married? Do you remember how, before mounting your bike for our cross-country trip, you found a penny on the ground and then another? You duct-taped them to the inside of your helmet and said, “I bet, when we have a baby, I’ll find a third immediately after. Just like today.”

And you did, Asher. You did. Only hours after welcoming our daughter, Bijou Emiko, you did.

Bijou. My girl. You are a beginning and a mystery. Who will you become? How will you become her? What days and minutes and seconds will shape your life?

“I deserve…,” I start, and my throat closes around the rest of the sentence.

“Take your time,” the therapist says.

I close my eyes, and nod. “I deserve… I deserve…”

“You’re doing great.”

“I deserve… her,” I say. “I deserve her. I deserve him… I deserve a family.”

Her eighth day in the world. My eyelids flutter and snap open to the sound of banging trash can lids, and the garbage truck outside. At first, I am so delusional I don’t know where I am. It takes me a moment to understand that I was putting Bijou—B—down for a nap and had fallen asleep in the rocker in her room. I blink hard, rub my eyes and face, and get a whiff of myself, that unmasked natural, animal funk. The sour odor of old dried milk and spit-up is in my hair and clothes. B sleeps on my chest, wrapped tight in a yellow blanket. She smells like powder, like baby, and I press my face into her warm neck.

The first time I said the words my daughter was yesterday evening. You were home with dress forms and new designs for the stores. The record player spun in the corner. Something with trombones and other screaming brass trumpeted into the apartment. A fire popped in the living room. Sage wafted throughout the place from the oven reheating the roast a downstairs neighbor graciously brought us. B nuzzled against your chest. She’d finished nursing and squirmed against you, gassy and preparing to wail. A fire truck roared down the avenue outside. Too much was happening, and my brain felt twisted, wrung dry.

“We need juice,” I’d blurted, reaching for my wallet and phone strewn across the coffee table. “And B needs those drops for gas.”

“I’ll run out and get them.”

“No,” I nearly shouted. “I haven’t been outside in two days. I’ll go.”

At Rite Aid, I filled the basket on my arm with fruit snacks and chocolate-covered almonds. A new pair of tweezers, the gas drops, a random pair of blue infant booties, and deodorant. I dumped the contents of my basket on the counter. The cashier, with her thick, ink-black eyeliner encircling her eyes, stared.

“You had your baby.”

I looked up from my haphazard pile between us. She’d never spoken to me before. “What?”

“You were pregnant and now you’re not. You had your baby.”

“I did.”

“Boy or girl?” Red lasers blinked as she dragged each item across the scanner.

“Girl,” I said, picking up the random booties. “These are for my daughter.”

She likes the floor, and when the apartment feels drafty (which it often does), we lie on the floor by the fireplace and beneath blankets. Her head rests just beneath your chin, and your hands, mammoth on her bitty curled body, rub her back. I lie beside you as you tell her the story of how we first met. “It all started with The Metamorphosis,” you say. The stars outside the window glitter with your voice; lean in, and I know all our children are listening.

The suckling sounds. The pursing of plump, shiny lips. The bundle of her diapered bottom on my forearm. Her wet belly in the bath, like a seal. The startle in her eyelids when water trickles from her head and down her face. All these things to tuck into a place I hope never to forget but surely will. That is how time works. The passage.

I whisper-yell on the phone with the bank, “My baby is sleeping! I will not speak louder. You listen harder,” and you laugh a little because it is funny, but also because you want everything to be okay.

The writer says she is cool to wait another month. I apologize and tell her I am working on things; I’ll have some money soon. She hands me the beginnings of a script over tea and asks to hold B. I flip through the pages and hold my breath. It is perfect. I write her a check for the money I owe her ($6,936) and tell her I will find a way for her to cash it in the next three days. But the writer refuses, kisses the baby’s knee.

Viola brings her children to New York to meet their cousin. To meet their aunt and uncle: me and you. She also brings her husband, the dentist. His teeth are not perfect but close. When we go out to dinner, he watches with wonder as Viola tells the story of sneaking our father’s rum from the back of his underwear drawer when she was fourteen and I was twelve. It was my idea. Our parents had taken a day trip to New York, and their train had been delayed for hours. Maya stayed with a friend. We finished the bottle, put on the prairie dresses Ma had sewn for a school play while losing our shit over Dad’s Richard Pryor records, and threw up the Twinkies and Doritos we’d bought with our American allowance into the creek out back.

Viola has one son and one daughter, who looks like me. Jasmine. Her face is spotted with freckles. She looks at me, at my own spotted face, and I know, for the first time in a long time, she feels okay.

“Auntie,” she calls me, when we are alone in the kitchen, and I ask her to say it again.

The day after they return home to North Carolina, I find a card on top of the refrigerator near the basket of baby bottles. Inside, a check. Signed Viola. I text her:

I can’t take that money.

You can and you will

take that money.

Viola??

Yes.

Thank you.

I wake with a jolt a lot these days. The sleep is short but so deep that sound must travel, rush wailing into the guts of me and yank me out. Except at night. In the middle of the night, it’s you who hears her first. Even with the monitor next to my head. You bring her, sit next to me in the bed as you soothe her with a pinky knuckle in her mouth and stroke me awake. Bijou gums and sucks at your finger. You hum without worry; I will be up soon.

Banging. It is not trash cans outside, but someone at the front door. You are at the new store and will not be home for hours. I carefully lift myself from the rocker and lay Bijou, who has been asleep against my body, in her crib. Everything hurts. My back; my boulder breasts and raw, cracked nipples; my vagina stitched back together like an unraveling seam. I make it to the bedroom door, my bones shifting and loose, and lean against the frame. The doctor says I’d lost a lot of blood. Iron supplements are my friend. I am tired and weak and walking with a two-inch-thick, foot-long maxi pad between my legs. I could bleed for two weeks. I could bleed for twelve.

Still with the banging.

I shuffle to the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt with pit stains.

“Hey.”

“Hello.”

Erika taps her finger against the doorframe. She is put together in stud earrings and a fitted coat, but she looks tired. “I apologize for the obnoxious banging. How are you?”

“Fine.” I shrug. “I mean, I’ve had three hours of sleep in the past two days and am walking around with a perpetual load in my pants, but things are pretty good.”

“Welcome to postpartum.”

“Do you want to come in?”

“As long as I’m not keeping you. I’m sure you’re busy with…”

“Bijou. Bijou Emiko.”

“Oh. Who has a more beautiful name than your girl? It’s like the most magical and multiethnic unicorn.” She smiles.

“Don’t make me laugh. I’ll either piss or my uterus will fall out.” I lean against the frame. “We’ve started calling her B for short.”

“That’s darling.”

“No, that’s Asher.”

“I can’t believe… I’m sorry I missed it.” She touches my face with her free hand. “And I’m sorry about the check. That was petty.”

Inside, I sit while Erika boils water and spoons coffee grounds into the French press. Minutes later, we both stand over Bijou’s crib, steaming mugs in hand, sipping while we watch her sleep. Erika tilts her head to one side as my daughter takes a deep breath, startled by the radiator kicking on and interrupting her dreams.

It’s raining again. Erika and I now stand at the wall of windows in the main room behind the dining table watching drops pelt the new leaves, new magnolias. Pigeons shiver and shake. The reflection in the window of our two freckled faces stares back at us. We’re on our second cup (her coffee, me mint tea) and munching cookies from a gift basket the writer sent. We both chose chocolate chip. The apartment is warm from the fire, and melted chocolate is in the corner of Erika’s mouth. A strand of her curly hair is stuck in it, and she wipes them both away.

“It started when my parents died,” I say. She’d never wanted the details, and that made sense. Now it made sense to share anyway. “We were at the same party when my sister Viola called and told me about the accident. I didn’t have a car, he did, and I asked if he would drive me home. Jameson was there for me in a real way during that time. I’d killed my family, indirectly of course, but I felt as if I had driven them over the edge of the bridge myself. Viola was the only family I had left, and she hated the thought of me. I had no one, and he was there.”

“Did you love him?”

“No.” I take another sip and burn my tongue. “Not romantically. I didn’t even love myself; it was impossible to love anyone else.”

“But he loved you.”

“I don’t know.”

She looks at me, face firm and fine lines beginning at the corners of her mouth. “You know he did.”

“I know he did.”

Erika looks back toward the window. “I’m a smart woman. He was good at faking it, but sometimes he’d slip. He has those charming, smiling eyes, the fake ones he uses to get what he wants. But then he has the real thing. The real smiling eyes that he only shares with the people he loves. He looks at Makena with those eyes, and at me. And every once in a while, he forgets himself and uses them to look at you. The problem is, I can’t tell if he’s looking at who you once were or who you are now. I don’t know if he loves you in the past or present.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“There’s nothing for you to say.” She sets her cup down. “It’s between me and him now.”

“I don’t love him.”

“I know you don’t.”

“This is why I told you from the beginning. Remember?”

She laughs. “I do. The picture was in an old law book he hasn’t touched since college. He says he forgot he had it.”

“Do you believe him?”

She stands at the window a moment longer without answering, then turns and walks to the dining table. Her bag is in one of the chairs and she pulls out her phone.

“Tobias Brooks,” she says. “He’s filmed several of the protests surrounding the boy from your photography class, Noah, David Bowen from Maryland, and now the young woman in Texas who was sitting at the traffic light. He’s a good friend of a producer I worked with when I first moved to New York. We kept in touch, and I told him about your project. They are both happy to help fund. I was able to get fifteen thousand dollars between the two of them. I gave them your number. I’m surprised they haven’t called you.”

“I haven’t checked my voicemail in days. Hold on.”

I move as quickly as I can to my bedroom. Overnight bags and baby clothes and my clothes and blankets and books and junk are strewn across everything. I start in a drawer first, shoving underwear and nursing bras aside when I hear a buzzing across the room. I follow it to my hospital bag, dump the insides onto the bed. It’s Erika.

I look up and she’s in the doorway. We both hang up and I check my missed calls. Three from two unknown numbers and two messages.

In his first class, Noah asked me how to be a good photographer and I told him, “Tell the truth.”

The next day, after you leave for work and several hours before the sitter comes and I leave for a shoot, I go to the hospital. B is strapped to my chest in a tan carrier made of soft cotton. In the mornings I wrap it over and under and around, like a cocoon with her nestled inside. She hears my heartbeat and drifts back to sleep. The puckering noises again. I sit on the edge of the bed and open the voice memo app on my phone, record her for seven minutes.

Outside, my rain jacket is large enough to cover us both, but as I stand at the corner a cold drip falls from an awning and lands on her temple. She doesn’t stir. I remove the scarf from my neck and secure it around my body, covering her face but leaving the top of her head in its black-and-white-striped cap exposed so the air gets in. I worry about things like that sometimes, whether or not she’s getting enough air. Whether or not the exhaust in the streets is too much for her lungs and if I should have stayed home. If I should have bought those earmuffs. Viola’s right that you can’t hear the birds. I cross the street and B hiccups. Is she nervous? Has she inherited my nervous tell? I wonder why everything seems so loud, then realize how much of it is in my head.

The nurses’ station is busy, and I can sneak by without notice. Not that they would mind; they know me as a “cousin.” But babies put certain people in the mood for making high-pitched sounds and chitchat, and nurses strike me as one of those certain types of people. Besides, babies aren’t allowed in the ICU. I know I should not have brought her. I know this. But how can I have her, how am I allowed to have her, when Noah wastes away alone? When Noah won’t wake up.

I stand inside Noah’s room, at the foot of his bed, for several minutes. Someone has braided his hair. I am waiting for his eyes to move, his fingers to jump. I am waiting for him to stand from his bed and walk the fuck out of here, unscathed and unbothered, though the cold might cause the bullet wounds in his back to ache.

“Pick up your mat and walk,” you said to me as you sliced zucchini squash for ratatouille, because you added the Bible to your WORDS FOR EVERY MAN bookshelf and had started reading it for five minutes in the morning followed by five minutes of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. You said his name was Lazarus. “And I am a smiling woman,” I said, only because I knew it would not be lost on you.

But Noah does not pick up his mat. He is not a smiling woman. B wakes up and begins to fuss. I check the clock. It is 9:23 a.m. and she is hungry. I did not plan well. It’s fine. It’s going to have to be. And I unravel my daughter from the wrap, set it on the bureau behind me, lift my sweater, and hold her to my nipple, dripping at the command of her budding cry. I rub the back of her head with my fingers as she feeds and rests her starfish hand on the hard throbbing of my blue-veined breast. We sway. Side to side I gently rock her, nurse and defend her, as I watch Noah’s chest inflate from the tube in his mouth. No twitching lids and no jumping fingers this time. No show.

B unlatches when she is done, and I am still not used to the release of suction. I lower my sweater and wipe her mouth with it. She is four weeks old and nine and a half pounds. She farts in my hand and smiles that involuntary smile of babies not yet in control of their muscles. They are pliable, mushy. Mollusks. Her breath is sour and a white-filmed drool oozes from the side of her mouth. I wipe it again. She opens her eyes with an alertness so alarming that I inhale suddenly because, somewhere in me, she has forced me to believe in the possibility of good things; that good things are possible, and I look up from her face to Noah.

He is still asleep, though. He is still the same.

I walk to the side of his bed, sit, and tell him about the dream I had last night: him with B in his lap. We are sitting on a park bench and he feeds her bits of bread, like a duckling. She is older, claps her hands. Her four front teeth like tiny shells in her rosebud mouth as she chews. That is it. That is the dream. I woke and my breasts were solid and sopping with milk.

In the dream, Noah’s face was colored with innocence. The same innocence my mom tried to protect as she kissed my freckled face each night before bed. It was the same innocence my father saw drain from my face as I knelt on the hood of his car after hours in a cell, daring him to move while my mom and Maya sat awestruck beside him. It was the same innocence I watched leave Viola’s face in the parking lot of an abortion clinic. It is the same innocence my father feared would be snatched from me one night as I snuck out of the house to get a camera from a boy. It is the same innocence I see missing from Noah’s face now. My father knew it. Little by little or all at once, we could be destroyed. We could be taken.

“Who’s going to take me, Dad?” My young voice, fifteen, when I’d sneaked out and gotten caught. When I was ravaged by defiance and disbelief.

My daughter coughs. Like she already knows the truth.

This is why I told you I couldn’t and wouldn’t try again. Not to anger you, not to deny you a family, but this. It is possible to feel competing feelings at once.

“Hey.”

A kid is in the doorway. A boy, thin and tall with a wool cap pulled low and onto his eyebrows.

“I’m leaving,” I say, scrambling to collect my things, B still and sleeping in my arms.

“Who are you?”

“A cousin.” I trip on the wheel of Noah’s bed, but catch myself.

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m leaving.” I don’t know if I have everything—I don’t care—and start to shove past him when he grabs my bag.

“He told me about you.” The boy’s eyes are damp. “What’s your name?”

“I have to go.”

“What’s your name?!”

And I know who he is. He can draw and make up stories. I like sitting in our sometimes silence.

I snatch my bag, dash like hell to the elevator.

My blood jumps.

In Washington Square Park. Monday evening and you push the stroller. The weather is beginning to warm but still carries a chill that slices through the fading sunlight, between the new leaves, to remind us of winter, that insecure thing. It snowed so much this year, as early as three weeks ago, and mounds of filthy ice still remain in sheltered, dank pockets at the base of trees. When the sun hits, the ice melts into the roots, spreading. I say, “I’ve been visiting Noah for months,” between bites of gyro as we stop to watch a chess match because the therapist wants me to stop disassociating and say it out loud to make it real. I accidentally bite off a piece of foil and pluck it and chewed onion from my tongue. You stop briefly from shuffling the stroller back and forth to keep B calm, knowing me enough to guess that my visits are without permission. You nudge your glasses, and your eyes are more honey than hazel in the sun. B makes an innocuous sound, a gurgling, and you walk again. You say, “I don’t like coming here anymore. We shouldn’t come here anymore,” and I agree.

“You hurt people with your selfishness,” you told me some time shortly after we were married. I mentioned this to the therapist and told her I couldn’t remember why you’d said that, what I’d done to make you say that, and she told me, “You can’t make anyone do anything—you are not that powerful. People are free to make their own choices.”

I wasn’t the “I love you” type, but I want to be. Before, before. I am no longer before. Something I have never told anyone, not even the therapist or the healer, whom I do not see anymore, with her crystals and cards. Your mother can walk again on her own. While I was pregnant and she was still living with us, I found her wedged between the toilet and the tub, robe open and underwear around her ankles. It was late and you had run to the bodega around the corner to get me marshmallows and popcorn. She groaned with one arm stuck behind the toilet, legs splayed and covered in urine. I slowly lowered to my knees, gripping my belly, and checked her body, taking my time around her head, within her hair, in search of knots or blood. I pulled a towel hanging from the rod, closed her robe and wiped her wet legs, offered her a bit of dignity. She turned her round chin up, eyes squinted like a rodent’s.

“I changed and it didn’t matter. Not at all. I changed for him, and she still hated me.”

“What are you talking about? Or better yet just be quiet. I don’t know how hurt you are…”

“My husband’s mother.” She laughed as I cleaned her, wiped the piss from her calves and ankles. “I changed so she would love me. I converted. It still wasn’t good enough. Asher doesn’t know. She hated me like I hate you because I wasn’t really one of them. I cared so much that she wouldn’t love me. And you just…you don’t care. You don’t care how much I hate you.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I really don’t.”

I gathered her frail body the best I could, her good arm draped over my shoulders and both of mine holding her up, and carried her back to bed.

Sometimes this freedom is bitter going down.

Our sitter lives upstairs with her mother, who likes to tell us how expensive her divorce was. Most times when I am alone with the sitter in the elevator, Kurt Cobain’s gravelly voice strains from her headphones. Also, Jimi Hendrix. She has gauges the size of quarters in both earlobes and an owl tattoo on the back of her arm. Sometimes, when you have taken B to the music group or Meir, I put on that enormous costume fox’s head and blast “In Bloom”; in underwear and nursing bra, banging your old drumsticks against laundry baskets, screaming the chorus until an upset neighbor stomps the ceiling, and I fall over laughing and leaking on the sheets.

Sometimes this freedom is a convulsive floating. Up, up, up.

Though our shopping bags are heavy, you stop for pomegranates. We are alone. The sitter is sweet and gifted us a Saturday morning of free babysitting for the holidays and we’ve only just now managed to use it. You took the day off. Only the second Saturday you’ve had off in three months. The sky is pale, and the sun is pale. “What does that mean?” you say, then look up. “Never mind. I see it now. It’s like it’s distilled. Pure.” And I look at you like the first time.

“Good morning.” The owner of the fruit stand is tall, unshaven, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a dusty brown coat. When he speaks, his breath rushes out. “How can I help you?”

“My wife loves your pomegranates.”

“Smart woman.” His face is windblown, red, dry like a leather strap. He picks up three pomegranates and holds them in front of us. “These are beautiful. How many do you want?”

“Six or seven.”

“Six or seven, huh? That means I give you seven. Works out better for me.” He laughs.

“We’ll take six apples too,” I say.

He shakes his index finger as he nods. He drops the pomegranates into your bag and as he reaches for the apples accidentally bumps the table and sends two oranges rolling onto the ground between the crowd.

“I got it,” you say, setting down the bags and shimmying, bent amid boots and sneakers. When you finally catch the rolling, battered fruit, I hear a scuffle and shouting a few yards down.

“No,” someone cries, a tired whinny and a groan. “No, my God, no.”

An alert across the bottom of your phone’s screen: Thirteen-year-old Noah Pierce of Fort Greene, Brooklyn…

In the market there is a ringing. On the street there is a ringing. On the subway platform there is a ringing. In my body, there is a ringing.

The next day, you do not want to tell me, but I am screaming and holding the baby and my knees are weak and buckling. You take B from me and get me to sit on the couch. You tell me what is happening: a riot has broken out in Fort Greene and Flatbush. At least three police cars are ablaze, an old gas station, an abandoned store. You could see it from the train, an orange glow infiltrating the sky like a sunset. Windows shatter from the heat, from the bricks hurled through windshields and storefronts. The streets reek of burned plastic and rubber. Two cops are dead, one injured. One suspect dead and one in custody. In the video in your feed, a man with a black bandana over his nose and mouth launches a flaming liquor bottle into a convenience store. Boom.

SHOT LIST

PRODUCTION TITLE: LOVE IN THE PRESENT TENSE BROOKLYN, NY — MOTHER: CYNTHIA

Cynthia Pierce greets us from the kitchen. Noah was the youthful, male version of his mother. Past tense. I can see his eyes in her eyes. His eyes behind the lenses of those black plastic frames. How he looked at me: mouth open, the corners ticking up and back, too timid to allow a smile to spread across his lips, pride gleaming through the red glow on his face when he developed his first photo. The fear that slid out of his eyes at that moment is the exact fear I see in his mother as she stands across the room from the writer, two cameramen, me, and B, whom I have not been able to leave for more than five minutes without leaking through my clothes.

Cynthia’s aunt had let us into the apartment, and a cousin held the door as the two-member crew hoisted cases of equipment up the narrow staircase, careful not to knock the rickety banister. Inside smells of lavender. We introduce ourselves before removing our coats and setting up. Thank the family for allowing us into their home to talk about Noah. Cynthia nods, cool and slow at the mention of his name, and offers us a glass of water.

I swallow bile back into my gut when she returns and my fingers graze hers in our transaction, the glass now trembling in my cold hand. I don’t know if she knows who I am: the photography teacher who canceled her son’s free class because her fertility specialist called. I begin to hiccup and try to conceal the noise with fake coughing, burying my mouth in my hands. I try not to vomit but cannot promise myself this.

“You okay?” one of the camera guys asks me, and I nod.

The dining room has the most windows and the best natural light. My guys set up in there, assembling lights and testing sound. They sit her at the table in front of a small mahogany bureau filled with dishes and glasses, polished silver. The dishes aren’t a complete set. Three different designs make up the stacks of plates and bowls behind the glass.

“Do you use your china often?” I ask as one of the camera guys adjusts the hidden microphone to her blouse. It is cream linen, loose across the bust. A leather necklace with a large, circular olive pendant lies against her chest between the open buttons. She is thinner than she looked in the pictures in the paper.

“No.” She pats the microphone into place, clears her throat. “Not since my mother passed. It was hers.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” She fiddles with her necklace. The clasp catches in the long twists of her hair, and her sister, who stands in the hall behind us, moves quickly to help. They look the same age, with smooth faces and necks.

Cynthia tells me that she moved in after Noah was shot to help with his little sister. Her husband Charles is a truck driver and away for long periods. After Noah, they couldn’t afford for him to take time off work, especially now that Cynthia could only work part-time. Noah took care of Zion after school. He’d come home, and he and his mother would exchange a kiss and a hug as they passed each other through the door. Zion napped for two hours, giving him enough time to grab a snack in peace and finish his homework. When she woke, he warmed the bottled breast milk in a pot of water on the stove, sat in his father’s rocking recliner, and fed her while watching anime DVDs. He’d put her in her bouncy seat and reheat his own dinner before reading her stories, singing her songs, and playing tickle monster with her favorite stuffed rabbit, Bop-bop. Bath time was 7:00 p.m., and after she was put down for bed, Noah would finish whatever homework he hadn’t earlier, then maybe play a video game before going to bed himself. Every morning, he made his mother breakfast while she slept.

“I clean offices in the city. I get home late,” Cynthia said, her tone even and offering nothing. “I don’t speak about how wonderful Noah was—which he was, by the way—to create some tale of a humble boy. I say this because it is the truth. Humility and kindness were the very essence of him. But he could have had the worst grades, spit in his sister’s milk, been on the corner doing God knows what, and he still wouldn’t have deserved what happened to him. Those policemen murdered my son.”

I conclude the interview forty-five minutes later. I have more questions, but I stop. Bile coats my tongue. My heart hurts. I thank her for being candid and ask if we can shoot some of the apartment for B-roll, it won’t take more than ten minutes. B is asleep. We have time.

Anime posters line the walls of Noah’s bedroom. Cartoon girls with svelte legs, and sparkling, dewy eyes bulging in exaggeration throw kicks and punches, fly through the star-filled air. He liked space, galaxies. A glow-in-the-dark solar system sticks to the ceiling above his bed. Crates of comic books sit categorized by main character beneath his window. A telescope he made out of found PVC pipe and cardboard sits broken-lens-side-down on the windowsill.

“Noah was different from most of the boys around here,” Cynthia says as I kneel, my fingers hovering over the tattered spines of his comics.

I peruse the top of his dresser. An old watch with a busted face breaks the silence with its loud ticking. His bright blue glasses case. A deck of comic-inspired cards. And a photo. His photo—the little girl jumping rope alone on a basketball court. The innocence on her face. The joy. I lift the camera hanging from a strap and at my side.

“You’re not his cousin,” she says. “You’re the photography teacher.”

I turn around to face her. “Excuse me?”

“You heard right.” And I notice she is holding something in her hand. A scarf? No. It is not a scarf but B’s wrap. I’d left it the last time I visited the hospital, when I’d run out because of the boy.

“Mrs. Pierce…”

“Call me Cynthia.” She gives it to me. “And you don’t have to explain. The hospital said my pregnant niece had been visiting. They asked when you were due. What is your baby’s name?”

“Bijou. Bijou Emiko.”

“How about that,” she says, swiping her finger down Bijou’s leg, then gripping her toes in her socks. Bijou, now awake, laughs, and Cynthia smiles.

“I read about you,” she says. “I found old newspaper articles online. Your story isn’t a common one. I’m sorry about what happened to your family.”

“Thank you.”

She extends her hand. “Can I see your camera? Noah talked about the camera in your class all the time. That class—that was a good thing.” I untangle the camera from B’s new wrap and my hair, hand it to her. “Tell me how it works.”

“Okay.” B makes a ba ba ba sound and I rub her belly. “This is a film camera, an M2. Here’s the shutter speed dial, the film advance. The lens. You focus it here. And here’s the viewfinder; this is what you look through. When you like what you see, you press this button.”

“Is it complicated?”

“It takes some practice.”

B begins to cry. She is hungry, and I bounce her.

“I had a hard time finding photos of you.”

“Not a lot of reason to get in front of a camera.”

“Are you nursing? You can feed her if you want.”

“We’re leaving soon. It’s all right. We’ve intruded on you long enough. Thank you again—”

“No.” She gestures to a chair. “Please, take care of your baby.”

I sit, lift my shirt, and unhook the bra cup, and B latches. Cynthia sits on the bed across from me. The camera is around her neck. She straightens the books on Noah’s bedside table.

“I hate that what you’re doing—this film you’re making—has to be done. But I’m grateful that it’s you who’s doing it.”

She raises the camera, takes my picture. Even though there is no flash, I blink in alarm.

“You understand loss, you feel it. You aren’t responsible, but you feel it. Do you understand?”

She takes another, advances film, then another. I wipe my face with the back of my hand. B tugs fast, the milk hurtling through tissue and cells to find her flared lips. In the other rooms, the writer and the camera guys chat. The writer gives instructions. There is a knock at the door and hellos.

“Who was Noah in your life?” I ask.

“He was a lonely kid. Different, like I said. But he taught me to ask questions. To keep finding out new things.”

An older woman who was not with us earlier stands in the doorway and Cynthia stops. She smiles and tells her good morning. My fingers run along the length of B’s foot as she eats. One sock has fallen off. The woman has a small tooth on the bottom that she tongues as Cynthia explains things that the woman likely already knows. Cynthia begins to introduce us, but B has finished eating and sneezes.

“What’s her name?” the woman asks, and I tell her. “Do you mind if I hold her?”

“No. It’s okay.”

She comes inside the room and lifts B and the cloth in my lap to burp her. For a moment we are silent as she sings, a low thrum. This stranger. A heat spreads across my face, a tender pulsing. My breath is full, lungs big and pressed against their cage. It is silent, and suddenly the woman looks up.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t get your name.”

I take a deep breath and look at the clock. “Oh, it’s—”

Acknowledgments

To my parents, Carlos and Jane Clarke—in eighth grade I read you a poem I wrote. You truly listened to and celebrated me. Thank you (and Chris and Dan) for all the years of love, encouragement, and support.

My grandparents Audley and Agnes Webster, who said their children would know literature, and Albert and Rachel Clarke. From Jamaica to Panama, you gave me the best family of storytellers.

Thank you, Dr. Erik W. Clarke, for offering a psychologist’s perspective to the book. Though you’ll always be that young twentysomething who, after we’d known each other for one hour, got in my car, sighed, and said, “So my girlfriend and I just broke up …” Thanks, cousin. We made it.

My agent, Sharon Pelletier, for believing in this story and its place in the world.

A big thank-you to everyone at Soft Skull Press. Mensah Demary, my editor, who saw the vision from jump, and said what this writer needed to hear: yes. Also Nicole Caputo, Laura Berry, and Cecilia Flores.

To my children, Gabrielle and Foster: “Matter” is the bare minimum. It is inherent. You are here to love and be loved, to prosper, to live fully.

All my love and gratitude to my husband, Aubrey. You are a gift. Thank you for honoring my need for time and space to write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Thank you for loving all of me.

© Kelley Raye

TIFFANY CLARKE HARRISON graduated from Salisbury University with a BA in English with a creative writing concentration, and holds an MFA in creative writing (fiction) from Queens University of Charlotte. Harrison lives with her husband and two children in North Carolina. Blue Hour is her debut novel.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2023 by Tiffany Clarke Harrison

All rights reserved under domestic and international copyright. Outside of fair use (such as quoting within a book review), no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. For permissions, please contact the publisher.

First Soft Skull Press edition: 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clarke Harrison, Tiffany, author.

Title: Blue hour / Tiffany Clarke Harrison.

Description: First Soft Skull Press edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2023.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022038559 | ISBN 9781593767495 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781593767501 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Domestic fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3603.L3824 B59 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220826

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038559

Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

Jacket photograph of table and cloud projection © Riho Aihara /

Millennium Images

Book design by Laura Berry

Published by Soft Skull Press

New York, NY

www.softskull.com

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