The Mothers Read Online Free

triplets . . .”
    â€œWhy would I want to know that?”
    He shrugged. “Some women do.”
    She already knew too much about the baby, like the fact that it was a boy. It was too early to actually tell, but she felt his foreignness in her body, something that was her and wasn’t her. A male presence. A boy child who would have Luke’s thick curls and squinty-eyed smile. No, she couldn’t think about that either. She couldn’t allow herself to love the baby because of Luke. So when the technician swirled the sensor in the blue goo on her stomach, she turned her head away.
    After a few moments, the technician stopped, pausing the sensor over her belly button.
    â€œHuh,” he said.
    â€œWhat?” she said. “What happened?”
    Maybe she wasn’t actually pregnant. That could happen, couldn’t it? Maybe the test had been wrong or maybe the baby had sensed he wasn’t wanted. Maybe he had given up on his own. She couldn’t help it—she turned toward the monitor. The screen filled with a wedge of grainy white light, and in the center, a black oval punctuated by a single white splotch.
    â€œYour womb’s a perfect sphere,” the technician said.
    â€œSo? What does that mean?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “That you’re a superhero, maybe.”
    He chuckled, swirling the sensor around the gel. She didn’t know what she expected to see in the sonogram—the sloping of a forehead, maybe, the outline of a belly. Not this, white and bean-shaped and small enough to cover with her thumb. How could this tiny light be a life? How could something this small bring hers to an end?
    When she returned to the waiting room, the girl in the jean jacket was sobbing. No one looked at her, not even the heavy woman, who was now sitting one seat over. Nadia had been wrong—this woman couldn’t be the girl’s mother. A mother would move toward a crying child, not away. Her mother would’ve held her and absorbed her tears into her own body. She would’ve rocked her and not let go until the nurse called her name again. But this woman reached over and pinched the crying girl’s thigh.
    â€œCut all that out,” she said. “You wanted to be grown? Well, now you grown.”
    â€”
    T HE PROCEDURE only takes ten minutes, the dreadlocked nurse told her. Less than an episode of television.
    In the chilly operating room, Nadia stared at the monitor thathung in front of her flashing pictures from beaches around the world. Overhead, speakers played a meditation CD—classical guitar over crashing waves—and she knew she was supposed to pretend she was lying on a tropical island, pressed against grains of white sand. But when the nurse fit the anesthesia mask on her face and told her to count to a hundred, she could only think about the girl abandoning her baby in the sand. Maybe the beach was a more natural place to leave a baby you couldn’t care for. Nestle him in the sand and hope someone found him—an old couple on a midnight stroll, a patrol cop sweeping his flashlight over beer cases. But if they didn’t, if no one stumbled upon him, he’d return to his first home, an ocean like the one inside of her. Water would break onto the shore, sweep him up in its arms, and rock him back to sleep.
    â€”
    W HEN IT WAS OVER , Luke never came for her.
    An hour after she’d called him, she was the only girl still waiting in the recovery room, curled in an overstuffed pink recliner, clutching a heat pad against her cramping stomach. For an hour, she’d stared into the dimness of the room, unable to make out the faces of the others but imagining they looked as blank as hers. Maybe the girl in the yellow dress had cried into the arms of her recliner. Or maybe the redhead had just continued her crossword puzzle. Maybe she’d been through this before or she already had children and couldn’t