My second thought is I’m losing my mind.
Carrie nods at the kettle. “Grab it before it whistles?”
She cups a hand over Jack’s ear. My baby eyes me reproachfully as I slide the kettle to the back burner. The moment he’s attached to someone else, I remember how lovely he is. With his curled fists and velvet cheeks, his scalp that inexplicably smells like cream and cinnamon. My need for him is physical, the way I once needed to cling to my own mother’s leg or how, as a teenager, I couldn’t keep my hands away from my hair. If I could, I would exist exclusively in those rare moments when Jack is returned to my arms.
The hours after he was born were the worst of my life. Two pediatricians whisked him off to the NICU, and every time I asked the roomful of remaining nurses and doctors what was wrong with my baby, they seemed to answer in another language. A resident stitched me back together under the supervision of an OB—who commented, casually, “It’s not your best work, but it’ll do”—while I, shocked and hollow and in no less pain than before, looked up at Gabe and said, “I haven’t even met him yet. I only came here so I could meet him.”
We were apart for two hours. All I ever understood about his time in the NICU was that someone there had taught him how to breathe.
In the aftermath of childbirth, women tend to announce their private thoughts. I don’t know why, but Carrie did it, and I did it too. Holding Jack for the first time, looking into the ice-blue eyes that have already darkened, I said, “Oh, we’re going to be fine.”
I couldn’t have imagined feeling a fraction of the frustration I now feel toward him nightly.
The problem is I am a person with only two hands, one boob that works better than the other, overactive tear ducts, injuries in dark places, and feet that no longer fit into my shoes. And I need to sleep. My need for sleep occurs to me sometimes as a revelation, the way when I was a child it would periodically dawn on me that what my parents needed was money.
When we both have tea—mine in my hands, Carrie’s growing cold on the counter—I finally think to say, “I hope we didn’t wake up Nina.”
“Nina’s not home.”
“Where is she?” The possibility of Nina being anywhere without Carrie is for me a novelty.
“Sleeping over at a friend’s house. I said no, earlier, but then you showed up . . . and, well.”
“You renegotiated? Is that wise?”
I realize I’m still swaying from side to side, dancing along with Carrie and Jack. To stop myself, I sink into a chair. Jack’s cheek is deflating against Carrie’s shoulder, his eyelids at half-mast.
“Nina demands constant renegotiation. It feels like I never stop bargaining with her.”
“Are things not good between you guys?”
I’m conscious of having phrased the question like I’m asking Carrie about a coworker, or a lover.
“She thinks I’m evil incarnate.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s just the usual preteen stuff. When I’m home, I’m breathing down her neck. When I’m working, I’m guilty of neglecting her on, like, a criminal level. I occasionally require her to eat a vegetable, or a damn egg. Yesterday I wouldn’t let her get a pair of camo jeans from the juniors section at Walmart, and she still hasn’t forgiven me.”
“Were the jeans expensive or something?”
“They were camo,” Carrie repeats. “Camouflage jeans.”
I blink at her.
“Camouflage is for ill-adjusted white boys who pose with the corpses of the animals they’ve just killed.”
“I doubt she sees it that way.”
“What other way is there?”
“I don’t know. There are hipsters wandering around Brooklyn in Carhartt jackets. She probably just thought they looked cool.”
Carrie shakes her head. Admittedly, I have a hard time picturing these pants on her daughter. If I try too hard to reconcile preteen Nina with the three-year-old I once carried on my hip through the aisles of the video rental store, beaming when people assumed she was mine, I know I’ll be flooded with regret.
“Where’s the sleepover?” I ask. In Deerling, a person’s address tells you everything you need to know. The town is divided into four quadrants: the farmlands, the trailer parks, and a residential jumble bisected by train tracks in the conventional sense. Carrie and I grew up on the right side of them. My mother has since downgraded.
Carrie avoids my actual question and tells me, “She has this new friend.”
“Go on.”
Carrie heaves a sigh. It’s a bottomless 3:00 a.m. sigh. “She’s fourteen, and her name is Maxine.”
“Max for short?”
“Never. Always Maxine.”
“What’s her deal?” I’m thirty-one years old, a card-carrying member of our neighborhood’s grocery co-op, and thrilled to be gossiping about some small-town teenage girl. This is the most enthralled I’ve been in months.
“No deal. She’s perfectly sweet. I mean, she keeps asking me to tattoo her, which is annoying.”
“What does she want?”
Carrie gives me a blank stare.
“Like, for her tattoo.”
“I haven’t asked. I’m not tattooing her. It’s illegal.”
“Do you ever do it, though? Tattoo kids who you know are lying about their age?”
“Of course not, Amanda. I could get my license revoked.”
I’ve insulted her. By implying she’s strapped for cash or somehow less than professional. It’s not what I meant. I was thinking about Carrie and me, the kind of mischief we used to concoct for ourselves. Back then, I couldn’t believe I would ever become an adult.
Now I can’t believe I’m supposed to stay one forever.
“Sorry,” I say.
“My concern about Maxine is I’m not sure her family’s the best influence on Nina. They’re filthy rich.”
“Come on, this is Deerling. No one’s filthy rich.”
“They won the lottery.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, assuming family money or stock market success.
“I mean they literally won the Powerball jackpot.”
“No.”
“And then they bought all that land adjacent to the wildlife preserve and built, like, a Cribs-style mansion on it. Tennis courts. A circular driveway. A pool edged with actual palm trees.”