Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

“I have to tell you something,” she said. She looked like a badly weathered drawing of herself, exhausted. “I don’t think I love the baby. I mean I do. But not the way Alex does.”

I told her that was natural, that a lot of women feel that way at first. I was repeating some Oprah shit she’d told me months earlier. I said she was tired, that she should try to nap. She nodded emptily. “Of course you love her,” I added as I walked her to her bed. She lay on top of the blankets.

As I closed the curtains she said, “I don’t.”

I said, “Shh,” and went into the living room to fold laundry. The bedroom door was open and I could hear her breathing, her head softly shifting on the feather pillow. “I don’t,” she said over and over. “I don’t.” Then she fell asleep. We never talked about it again.

• • •

In this one Ezra and I are drinking coffee and sharing a miniature newspaper. We woke up with that loopy, underwater kind of hangover, the sort that pleasantly expands to consume an entire day. We walked to this shoe-box café, hand in hand. We are carved from wood blocks, and the midmorning sun glitters on our grooved faces. I’ve told him about that day, about how afraid Carly made me. How she was saying things our mother might have said. What I need to know, I’ve told him, is if that feeling ever left her. Because if it never left her, it would never leave me.

Ezra has leaned across the table and taken my face in his hands. “Hey,” he’s said. “Look at me. You’re not her. You hear me? You’re not anyone but you.” I’ve pulled away from him. “You don’t get it,” I’ve said. “It’s in me.” He’s hurt — see his eyes, his soft upturned hands — and I am surprised that I am capable of hurting him. “Christ,” he is saying. “It’s like I’m trying to dig you out when all you want is to be buried with her.” I call it The Truest Thing You Ever Said .

• • •

When Carly arrived the next night, she came into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The Miracle wore a pair of sparkly gold fairy wings and a headband with a giant sunflower mounted to one side. She held a pair of orange plastic nunchucks, the only toy I’d ever seen her interested in.

I was in the bath. “I thought she wasn’t allowed to play at violence,” I said.

“Guns mostly,” said Carly. “We don’t have a nunchuck policy.” Then she said, “I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I brought someone here. You should probably put some clothes on.”

I rose out of the tub and wrapped myself in my bathrobe. Everything was worth it. Ezra would see how I’d kept our world as he’d left it, how I never stopped wanting him. I saw his fingers tracing over our old life. He’d take me in his arms and say what an idiot he’d been. He’d say, I want this. One hundred percent. All the time. Anything he said would have been enough. He could have said nothing.

Instead, bent over the artifacts on my nightstand was Sam.

The Miracle smacked her mother with her nunchucks and said, “All right!”

“Hey,” Sam said. “How are you?”

I said, “Uh, okay.”

He glanced at Carly. “I was thinking we could go for a walk,” he said to me. He looked fitter, slimmer in the face. He wore a dark green sweater I didn’t recognize. This baffled me, that he’d bought a sweater. I said, “I’ll get dressed.”

Out on the sidewalk, Sam said, “Which way?”

“Doesn’t matter.” We started out on our old route toward the river.

Neither of us spoke. My fingers were cold. I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my coat. “What’s with the nunchucks?” I said.

“You never told me whether she had a boy or a girl.”

We were quiet again, the only sounds our shoes on the sidewalk, and occasional cars driving by. “You could have gotten something neutral,” I said.

He shrugged. I remembered that easy Sam shrug. “Those are cool, right?”

“Yeah. They’re cool.” We turned a corner and I pulled a dying leaf from a low-hanging branch. “What did she tell you?”

“Everything, I think.”

I ripped segments off the leaf and let them fall papery to the ground. “Everything.”

Sam nodded to the leaf. “Bigtooth maple.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember.” I spliced the stem with my thumbnail and we went on quietly. Finally I said, “I’m not going to have it.”

“She says you haven’t made the appointment yet.”

“I keep thinking things might change.”

“And you haven’t told him?”

“It’s stupid. I know.” We came upon the river. Midway across the bridge we stopped and leaned on the rail.

“She says you’re saving his stuff.”

“Not saving it.” I let the last shred of the leaf flutter to the water. “I love him. I go to make the appointment and I can’t. I’m sitting there with the phone and my fucking calendar, you know? Like I’m having my teeth cleaned. It isn’t the baby. Maybe it’s just… I don’t want us reduced to an appointment. We were more than that.”

He sighed and dipped his head between his big hands.

“Sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t.

Sam rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. His face was red. “You never thought that about us?”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

I turned back toward the water. He turned and faced the water, too. “I still think about it,” he said. “Ours.”

I felt ambushed, suddenly, though of course I had been all along. “I don’t, Sam. Don’t you get that? I don’t think about it. I never have. I’m all fucked up. You never got that.”

He laughed a laugh with an edge to it, a laugh I’d rarely heard from him and only toward the end. “I get that,” he said. “Believe me. That’s not why I came. I told Carly I’d talk to you.” He looked up. “But I know you, Nat. I know what you’re capable of. What you’re not.” His hands were trembling at the rail. “Look at you. You don’t even want to be happy. We were good together. We were happy. Ours was the right one and you couldn’t stand it. And now. This guy?”

“You don’t even know him.”

“I don’t have to.”

He was right and I should have told him as much. Instead I said, “We should get back.”

He nodded once and turned. We walked back without speaking, him always a few steps ahead of me. A couple times his back straightened and he inhaled sharply as if he wanted to say something. But he never did. In front of my apartment he said, “I’m going to catch a bus. Let your sister know, will you?”

I said, “Wait, Sam. Will you wait a second?” I brought my keys out of my pocket and unlocked my car.

It had been glossy when they printed it out but it had gone satin, somehow. The edges of the quarter sheet had curled in on themselves. He took it from my hand. “What’s this?”

“They gave it to me.” I pointed where the heavy woman had pointed, the white brackets, the dark space. “There,” I said.

He opened his mouth a little. “You kept this?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was true, though not in the way I let him believe.

He held it delicately, smoothing a curled corner with his thumb. He said nothing for a long time; then he ran his finger along the bottom edge. “What do these numbers mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t ask.” He held it a while longer, closer to him. When he tried to give it back I gestured for him to keep it. It seemed he would, at first. But then, suddenly, he thrust it back at me and said, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“I thought you’d want it.”

He looked at it again, disgusted, as though he could see everything wrong with me in the image. “It’s a piece of paper,” he said finally. “It doesn’t work like that.”