Vendela Vida - The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

“So tell her what happens,” Hazel says. “I’m almost done here, by the way. Sorry to keep you ladies captive but I’m really excited about this drawing.”

“No problem,” Samantha says, turning back to you, eyes alight. “So this was about two months ago now. I was the nurse on duty at my hospital and this one twin gives birth — it’s an intense birth, no pain medication. She insisted on doing it natural, if you can imagine. She gives birth to this beautiful girl, a nose like Cleopatra’s.”

You wince. You stare out the doorway of the room. You have to get away.

“I think I see her,” you say.

“Who?” Hazel says.

“The missing woman. I saw her pass by. I’m going to go ahead if you don’t mind.”

“Go! Find her!” Samantha says. “We’ll catch up.”

You walk quickly out of the room, and then when you’re out of their sight, you run. You hear your breath. As you round a corner, you collide with pedestrians and apologize without stopping. You turn to see if Hazel and Samantha are behind you. You think you see them. You duck under a stairwell to hide. Someone’s coming down the stairs. You keep moving. You picture your sister. You picture the baby. You remember how the nurse, whose name you now know is Samantha, held her out to you, but your sister intercepted. She took the baby from Samantha, and rocked her uncomfortably.

You pulled the sheet of the bed up and over your head and covered your face. You stayed like that until Samantha gently pulled the sheet down to your shoulders. “Oh, honey,” she said. “This isn’t a morgue.”

You run down a narrow passageway with small doors. Laundry hangs above you. You hear a baby crying, you hear someone playing an oud. You smell urine.

Friends who had given birth themselves had warned you about the third day after birth, how the hormones would overtake your body and you would be left a sobbing mess. You didn’t think it would happen to you. You thought your experience would be different because the baby was not your own. But it was worse.

You run faster, harder.

Your sister came to your house, a week after the birth. She rang your doorbell. She never rang your doorbell. Usually she knocked or used the key. She knew where the key was hidden: underneath the paint can next to the recycling bin.

You opened the door. “What, no baby?” you said.

“She’s with the nanny,” she said.

You told her you’d love to help out whenever you could; you reminded her that you hadn’t seen the baby as much as you expected.

“Can we sit?” she said as she stood on your doorstep.

“Of course,” you said, and she entered and sat down at the kitchen table. You made tea for both of you. You feared that she was going to tell you the baby was sick, that she was dying. There was a somber tone to her arrival at your doorstep.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” you said. Your concern grew. You rarely told each other this. What was wrong with the baby?

“I don’t want what I’m about to tell you to be personal,” she said.

“Okay,” you said, swallowing hard. You knew that meant it would be personal.

“Do you have something stronger than tea?” she said.

“Like coffee?” you said.

“No, like vodka.”

You made your sister a vodka tonic. “I have fresh limes from my neighbor’s garden,” you said to fill the silence.

“It’s fine as is,” she said.

You placed the drink in front of her.

“I’ve been disloyal,” she said to you.

“Oh no,” you said, thinking, Thank God it’s not about the baby.

“For how long?” you said.

“Five months now.”

“I’m sure things with the fertility. . I’m sure everything got complicated,” you said. “Maybe you and Drew can see a counselor.”

“It did get complicated,” she said.

You run through a tiny courtyard where boys are playing soccer. You almost trip over the ball. You keep running, and the boys’ laughter follows you.

Your sister asked for another drink. You made her one. This time you placed a slice of the lime on the rim.

“Who’s the man?” you said.

“That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

She paced. She walked out to the deck, and then back again.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

“Can’t do what?” you said.

“It’s him,” she said. You followed her gaze. She was looking at your husband’s socks. He was in the habit of taking them off when he was reading on the couch and leaving them on the floor.

“Who?” you said.

She didn’t answer.

“Who?” you said, this time louder.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking at the socks.

You run faster. You can hear your heartbeat pounding in your ears. Your sandals slap against the cobblestone.

Your husband didn’t come home that night, or the next. You left him messages on his cell phone telling him not to bother. But you hoped he would bother, you hoped he would care. You imagined him coming in the front door and finding you wherever you were in the house and telling you your sister had a problem: she’d entwined your lives so thoroughly that she’d gotten herself confused. But he didn’t call, and didn’t return to the home you no longer wanted to live in.

You called your husband’s parents. You wanted them to know, but the conversation had exploded into accusations and lies and screaming. You called Drew, your sister’s husband, and he told you your sister and your husband were planning on living together with the baby. He told you he was suing his wife, and your husband, for custody. This conversation too ended loudly, and you hung up, threw the phone, broke the phone. Broke everything of your husband’s, told him not to come back for anything — it was all broken, burned, sold.

Your nipples still ached. Your milk had come in and you had not nursed. You called the midwife and told her your breasts felt they were being pricked by pins. She advised you to buy cabbage leaves and keep them in your freezer, and to periodically place one of them on your nipples. You lay on the floor of your bedroom with cold cabbage leaves cupping your breasts.

You tried to avoid mirrors. Your body was still swollen, the veins on your chest and legs a sickly blue. You called your boss and quit. He had refused to give you maternity leave. He had said to you: “It’s not like you’re really a mother, now is it?”

A week after your sister had come to your house, the midwife knocked on the door. “You didn’t answer my calls,” she said when you looked out the peephole. You told her everything. She held you tight, and then helped you put all your things in storage. You stayed at her house, slept on her couch under a blanket she had knitted for a baby she had lost in the final trimester. She told you about Morocco; she’d lived there after college, had traveled alone and met new friends, one of them a midwife. She made you want to go, go to the desert, see new things, to experience what it was like to be a woman in a country like that. She told you it would give you a new perspective, which you hoped, at the time, meant that you would see everything as a mirage.

Your breath is hot and loud. You reach an empty, residential square, and rest with your back against the wall of a small terra-cotta house. Soon your breath is even, almost calm. It’s this calm that has surprised you before. You panic and you rage, then this calm settles over you, and you remake yourself.

A vendor wearing Versace sunglasses that are fake or stolen approaches you. You don’t know how he’s found you here and you wish he’d go away.

“Hello, lady,” he says. “Hello, nice lady.”

He is in his early twenties. “I have camera you like. Nice camera.”