these signs began to feel less like benedictions, more like blame. I didn’t tell Heath; this was for me, and I didn’t need a psychiatrist to understand what these visions were—a reminder of how the baby would have developed if she were still safe inside of me.
The moon has been replaced by the buttery glow of midafternoon sun when I’m woken by my phone ringing. I know without looking it’ll be my mother or Heath. By now, no one else bothers to call.
“Hello.”
“You’re still in bed,” Heath says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
The college has been kind, allowing me to stretch the interpretation of “sick leave” these last few months, as long as the job gets done. I’ve covered my bases diligently: all accounts manned, no client left untended. Mostly I work from home, running formulaic programs that allow financial aid to go through so students can buy their textbooks and birth control, stock their shelves with Top Ramen. But Heath knows my primary post is my bed, my real work the practice of forgetting through sleep.
“You have to pick Nila up from school today.”
I bring my free hand to my face and examine the fingers, the pinkish white of my nails, the frayed cuticles holding them in place. I bring them to my mouth and bite away the excess skin.
“Are you there?” Heath asks, and I hear an edge of worry in his voice, expertly mixed with a dash of irritation—our most common cocktail these days.
“Yes,” I say, still gnawing. My stomach rumbles.
“Rayna . . . you promised you would spend the day with her.” He pauses, and the space between us hisses with static, his wishes and mine distorted through the phone lines. “Please,” Heath says, and I sigh. Now that I’m pitiful, I’m a sucker for beggars.
“I’m getting up,” I tell him. I work up a spit in my mouth, swallow the torn-off skin.
I park on the street, outside the circle of mothers and fathers corralled along the drive marked for child pick-up. The children are hazy with movement, erratic bits of color sprinting from the school, waving papers, some carrying retro plastic lunch boxes, the kind I used to beg my mother for. Everything always comes back. The children screech like seabirds and collide with their parents with the same energy as waves meeting the shore. I shield my eyes and search for Nila in the crowd.
I see her among all the others at the edge of the curb, her tongue poked out in concentration, looking for me. At the sight of her, a pang starts up in my stomach, a kind of knocking, some feeling asking to be acknowledged. My hand is on the keys and the gas tank marked full. It would be easy to drive away before I’m spotted. I could vanish—follow the wet summery air down an unfamiliar highway and try to escape the little legs dancing on my kitchen counter, or the lungs the size of kidney beans wheezing from the nightstand. I imagine cracked earth; giant saguaro; the hot air drying the farther west I ride and the sun sinking red. Out there, I would track vipers through the bleached sand and lie beneath the moon’s cool regard, my belly full and swaying with meat. The coyotes would sing my lullaby.
I pull the key from the ignition and get out of the car, cross the street, and hold my hand high. I wave. It’s been almost five weeks since I’ve seen her, and I’d forgotten her six-year-old’s exuberance, the brightness of her hair, that she loves me. She throws her arms around my waist, and her stomach, soft and plump, pushes against me. I hold her away from my body at the shoulders, look into her face, and feel nothing but appetite.
“Let’s get some food,” I say, trying on a smile, a stretched thing.
At the car, I buckle Nila into the backseat and she tells me about Jupiter’s moons and clouds of space dust where stars are born. She tells me about gravity, how it keeps us pinned to Earth and makes apples fall from trees. “We did drawings today,” she says, and promises to show me later. I know what I’m supposed to say, but can’t. I am a dead satellite, picking up information but relaying nothing back. She’s a smart kid, she senses this. She tells me she missed me, and because I’m trying, because I love her, I lie.
“I missed you, too,” I say, and guide the car onto the road.
Heath and the ex-wife have agreed Nila must eat vegetables with every meal, a helping of fresh fruit and whole grains with little allowance for processed junk. I order bacon cheeseburgers and large fries at Wendy’s and we eat them in the parking lot, sharing a chocolate Frosty between us, dipping our fries into it, getting brain freeze as the cold saturates our teeth. I let her gulp down my orange soda between sloppy, open-mouthed bites, flick away the bit of hamburger and bread left on the straw like a flea.
“Our secret,” I tell her with a cartoon wink.
“Can we go to the toy store after?”
I recognize the hard bargain, the first experiment with parental blackmail, and don’t resist. From the early childhood development books I’d devoured, I know this type of thing is natural. A sign of normal growth. At the toy store, I give her a quarter, watch her insert it into the crank of a dilapidated gumball machine and grin as the ball spirals down the chute into her waiting hand. I watch her mouth become a red ruin as she chews, her small, perfect teeth smeared with candy blood.
We do Nila’s homework at the dining room table; she’s still babbling, her mind a constant river, surging forward, changing course. Unlike her father, she requires only modest participation. She tells me that the only place as strange as space is the sea. Heath will be home in an hour, no more than two, and then I can escape this, crawl into my bed and lie naked beneath the sheets. I scribble gray spirals in the margins of her papers with one of her fat school pencils and imagine myself disappearing.
“Look,” Nila says, fetching a construction paper cube from her backpack, pride glowing in the focused point of her face. The cube is only slightly smushed. “I made this.” Its six sides are different colored papers taped together and each one bears a face drawn in Magic Marker and Crayola.
“Here’s Mommy and Daddy and me,” she says, rotating it so I can see. Heath’s side is the blue of robin’s egg and his eyebrows hover like two hyphens above his squiggle hair. He seems surprised to find himself rendered in his daughter’s careful hand. There’s Maui, her French bulldog, with a happy lolling tongue. I’m there too, depicted on yellow, my mouth a seedless watermelon slice. I could be laughing or screaming.
Nila holds the last side out like a gift, and there on pink, another body part. She’s drawn a generic baby’s head: there’s a halo and bird’s wings where a neck should be, and its eyes are closed, as if in peace. I can feel her expectancy, her need for my approval, for me to say Thank you or Nice work. She’s waiting for me to be the mother.
I run to the hallway bathroom and vomit into the toilet. I do it again, and again, until there is only bile, the same cautionary shade as my stick-figure face. I can hear Nila outside the door, the fear in her voice as she calls to me and brushes against the knob. “Don’t come in!” I say. I flush the toilet and climb into the tub.
I know I should go to her, should comfort her and tell her I’m fine, but I can’t see her right now. I’m tired of smiling when Heath sides with the doctors, says we can try again soon, as if life is interchangeable, one indistinguishable from another. Right now I can’t pretend that I’m okay or that Nila is mine. There is no make-believe that makes me less horrible, that changes the fact that all day I have wondered why Nila is here—her living, breathing, tangible form—while my baby is not.
Heath’s home. His deep voice reaches me through the bathroom door, a soothing rumble. In the pauses between, I know Nila is filling him in on our day, directing him to my presence behind the door. He pokes his head in and when he sees me curled in the tub, his face clouds. I feel bad for him, but not bad enough to explain. “How long has she been out here by herself?” he asks, and I shrug.
“Is the house burned down?”
A muscle tenses in his cheek. “We’ll talk when I get back,” he says, and closes the door behind him. I can hear him pacing, gathering Nila’s