Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

“Please say maybe,” Susanna said quietly. “Please?”

Allie sighed. “I already did.”

“Again? Please.”

“Okay,” Allie said to the swollen face of the woman looking at her from the rearview mirror. A face she barely recognized. “Maybe.”

Allie tugged on the sleeping boys’ harnesses one more time to make sure they were secure. The boys’ heads had fallen forward, their chins touching their chests at an awkward angle that looked painful. She lifted one boy’s head, and then the other, her fingers gripping gently as she held their heads upright.

She would hold them like that for the rest of the trip, she told herself, even after her arms began to shake and her muscles began to burn. She would never let go.

Her fingertips rested over each boy’s artery. The thrum of their even pulses became a chant. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Nicole rearrangedher mother’s Madame Alexander dolls for the third time. Had Marie Antoinette stood next to Little Bo Peep, with her dust-crusted curls, or had Scarlett O’Hara, in her sun-faded green gown, stood between them? Nicole had to get it right or her mother might suspect that ten adults and a gaggle of children had stayed there for the weekend. Then her mother would have questions and ask in that voice full of suspicion, the one that had always made Nicole confess, What have you been up to, Nicole Marie? No matter how hard she tried, she knew she’d spill over and the fear and shame would cascade over her lips and she would tell all; the Web bots and The End and her selfish lies, and her mother would admonish Nicole in her Queens-tinged sneer, Snap out of it, Nicole. Get ahold of yourself. You’re a mother now, for Chrissakes. Your children need you!

Her mother was right, Nicole thought as she looked out the tall windows of her parents’ bedroom. A storm was coming and the sea reflected the dark gray clouds above. The white-capped waves flung themselves at the seawall, a concussion that made the floor under her feet shudder. She flinched as a spray of frothy seawater smacked into the windows of the ground floor.

She heard shouting and Wyatt appeared on the deck below, his too-long brown hair bouncing, followed by Chase and Hank, all of them half-naked and squealing with glee as water leapt over the seawall.

“No,” she said, her breath catching in her throat as she slammed an open hand against the thick glass. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was?

She banged the heel of her hand against the window until her palm stung. The sea roared and the waves rocked against the boulders. Dear God, she thought, knowing there was no way they’d hear her.

She didn’t sense Josh until he was just behind her, his warm breath on the back of her neck. She lowered her heels and let her arms fall at her sides in surrender. She rested her forehead against the cool glass of the window, fogged by her handprint.

“Ha,” she said weakly. “You caught me. I guess some things never change.”

“They’re okay,” Josh said. “You’re okay.”

“No, I’m not.”

She was looking at him now and felt her eyes squinting and knew she looked mean. “You don’t understand what it’s like. To be so fucking scared all the time.”

Josh gripped her wrists, and she imagined she heard her bones crunching. He shook her, hard enough that an earring flew from one earlobe and landed with a ping on her mother’s lacquered dresser.

“Don’t you think I’m scared, too?”

He held her wrists apart, and she thought he might lift her off the ground.

“One day,” he said, “you wake up, and your kid’s anxiety is giving you anxiety. But — you say fuck you to your own fears. Now, you are a grown-up.”

She saw the lines around his eyes, the sagging skin under his jaw. She smelled beer on his breath.

He pulled her into his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“No,” she murmured back. “Don’t say sorry.”

She would try harder to be a better wife and mother, she thought as she unfolded herself from his arms.

She asked him (sweetly, she hoped) to go get Wyatt dressed.

She had just a few more things to tidy up here, she promised, and she would join them downstairs.

“It’s time to go home,” she said.

* * *

Nicole lit her last joint and stood in front of the windows, which were thick with gray-veined storm clouds. She watched the children down below on the deck, the muscles under their browned skin tensing as they anticipated the waves.

She was waiting, too. What for, she did not know.

It was true, what the experienced mothers at her tea party — themed baby shower, almost four years ago, had forewarned, with what, at the time, had seemed like kindheartedness. And just a dash of sarcasm.

Life will never be the same, they told her.

Now, in her own life after children, she wondered if there wasn’t a hint of something spiteful hiding behind those mothers’ chuckles. Her aunts, her older cousins, all of whom had birthed children, and who had brought her gifts of bottle warmers and onesies and diaper genies, who had oohed and aahed at unwrapped gifts with gasps that had seemed like nostalgic longing, but, Nicole knew now, were more the satisfied sighs of retribution. They were the toothless stepmothers and aging queens of fairy tales, envious of the virginal princess’s beauty. It’s your turn, sweetie.

Nicole had brushed off their warnings ( Sleep now, while you still can!) with a complacent smile, as if their prophecies were the hyperbole of old women, as if they were just remembering motherhood wrong. As her body had swelled with Wyatt, she’d created a dream collage of motherhood, pasted together with snippets from the natural birthing class she and Josh joined, the parenting books she read, the mother characters who had populated the movies and television shows she’d consumed in the last two decades. It was all the maternal material she had to learn from, after all. She hadn’t known any young mothers. Her aunts and older cousins were spread out across the East Coast. She saw them and their babies once a year at Christmas dinner. She’d never seen a baby latch on to its mother’s glistening nipple. Or projectile vomit. Or have its fingernails clipped. She knew nothing of the how-to of little children. Thirty-one when Wyatt was born, she had been the youngest mother she knew, the first of her friends to give birth into a world populated with ambitious women, for whom career was priority, a choice bolstered by their knowledge of the if-all-else-fails backup of fertility treatment. All you had to do was look around at the many sets of twins, and even triplets, whose SUV-like strollers crowded the sidewalks, and you felt certain that practically anyone could have a baby at any time if they wanted one.

Those women at Nicole’s baby shower had been telling the truth. She knew that now. How had she been such a fool? Why hadn’t she been able to imagine the coming challenge? The foresight would have helped her prepare, maybe lessened the shock that was their first night home with Wyatt, when the baby cried hour after hour, despite the fresh diaper, the full bottle, the offered breast, the perfect swaddling technique, the shushing, rocking, and lullabies. She had listened to him cry while she stood in the hot shower, blood dripping down her thighs, blood that would drip out of her for six weeks after the birth. She remembered wishing she could stay in the bathroom, that she could lock herself in there. Forever.

After three sleepless nights, she’d been delirious, and had said to Josh, as if it were a new revelation, “We can’t do this!”