Milk Blood Heat Read online

  “What’s he do now?”

  “Grows pot in Colorado. Everyone’s mad as hell, but he says he’s making way more money.”

  They ride the elevator up to the tenth floor, and Ava leads Kiera to an unmarked door that takes them to the roof. They can see their whole downtown, bisected and tidy, rolling out around them in unremarkable beige and gray buildings barely taller than the hotel; in the distance, the blue bridge spans the St. Johns and the handful of slender, glassy towers flash from the other side. Ava feels disgusted by this place, her home, but also exhilarated, as if viewing a world she can fit in her palm, where she is king, owns the light, and no mother can dictate what she needs.

  The girls eat their cake with their fingers and dangle their legs from the roof, watching the tops of people’s heads as they enter and exit the hotel lugging suitcases and their five or six kids, listening to the indistinct bustle of other people’s lives. Ava can’t tell if any of them are happy from way up here, if anything really gets better with age.

  “How would it be to get ground up in a meat grinder?” Ava asks.

  Kiera mimes flipping sausage in a pan. “Can you imagine? Someone frying you up for breakfast?”

  “Yum,” Ava says.

  “How’d it be to get executed? Anne Boleyn-style? Off with your head!”

  The girls go back and forth, losing track of the time, and for a few moments, it really is a world where only she and Kiera exist. A perfect place.

  “We should get back,” Ava says, standing up, “before they call the police.”

  “Gross,” Kiera drawls, rising, too. She seems perplexed, looking out over the sparse rooftops like she’s seen something but can’t figure out what it is. She floats her paper plate off the roof and Ava does the same, watching as they waft slowly, beautifully, to the ground. Ava turns to go back.

  From behind her, Kiera says, “How would it be to fall from a roof?” The image flashes in Ava’s mind—rush of air, bones breaking, the red and lumpy splat. Grisly. She spins around to say this word to Kiera, but sees only the sky stretching blue—a real God’s blue—overtop the ugly buildings.

  Down below, someone starts screaming.

  Ava feels her body being pulled toward the ledge. Kiera’s name is stuck in her throat, her lungs shrinking, blood rushing to her head like the fluttering of wings. Her feet move without her consent as two contrary wants rise up inside her: the want to run, and also to see everything.

  Ava leans over the edge, and looks.

  IV. Q&A

  Q: Why?

  And beneath that question, only others. Some of it meant, but all of it grief.

  What were you doing on the roof? How did you get up there? (Didn’t I raise you with more sense than that?) Did she say that she was sad? Was it something we did? Was she mad at us? How could this happen? (Why weren’t you being watched?) Did you two get in a fight, did you push her? (You’re accusing my daughter?) What are we supposed to think? Why didn’t you stop her? (How could she?) Why would a child . . . ? How could a child . . . ? Is this our fault? (. . .) What do we do now? Where do we go from this?

  After the ambulance departs (lights off), after the police collect their statements, after anyone can finally move from the shock, they go home. Ava twists in the backseat, watching the hotel fade behind her in the dark. She’d told them everything she knew, except the thing they can’t handle, the thing it’s kinder not to say. That of all the possible and conflicting truths, there is a smaller, much simpler reason Kiera chose to fall.

  A: She wanted to know what it felt like.

  V. Blood

  She gets her period in the bathtub three days after they put Kiera in the ground. The blood is dark, more than just blood, solid red shapes bobbing on water. A low pain thrums through Ava’s stomach and the small of her back, but it doesn’t mean anything now. There’s no one to compare with. The whole thrill of it was to stand face-to-face with Kiera and feel, for a moment, that they were the same. But Kiera was always first in everything they did, even this. Ava realizes while she has played at death, it’s a thing Kiera owns.

  Kiera was the one person who’d ever really seen her. She recognized something in Ava’s face, something kindred to herself, and came to name it. (I feel like I’m drowning.) Who would know her now? Not her mother, whom Ava stayed silent with because if she didn’t, she knew she’d scream, the howling erupting—an unstoppable, vibrant poison. Her mother didn’t say this to her, but she’d heard her talking to her friends: If they’da spanked that girl every now and then, maybe she’d be alive.

  Ava takes a long, slow breath and sinks below the water. She keeps her eyes closed as her body settles on the porcelain bottom; her heart is a constant thud, a sound as well as a feeling. It fills the tub—comforting, disappointing, absolute. Could she be like Kiera? Open her mouth and let water and blood pour in?

  She opens her eyes instead of her mouth and there is her mother standing above her, watching, face indistinct above the ripples. She shoots up, swallowing water in surprise, choking on it. Ava’s mother leans down and grabs her roughly by the shoulders. Her hands are firm even through the slips of water flowing down Ava’s arms. She squeezes her and makes her daughter look her in the eyes.

  “That’s forever. Do you hear me?” she says, and Ava, for the first time since she’s been thirteen, sees a flash of recognition in her mother’s face, some bit of knowing. (What If she’s seen me all along?) This new idea disrupts Ava, rattles something loose inside her, and the tears come hot and fast with the pressure of the empty emptying out. She sits and shakes with her mother’s fingers pressing into her arms, and it feels so good to hurt.

  “It’s okay,” her mother says. “Let it out.”

  Her mother grabs a towel and lifts Ava to her feet, dries her, and after showing Ava how to use a pad, leads her to the living room. With Ava sitting between her legs, she detangles her daughter’s hair and oils her scalp, massaging it with her sure fingers. She braids the hair into a crown and all the while she lets Ava cry, saying nothing. Ava wonders at this new emotion, of feeling cracked open—like a small, big thing is happening inside of her, making room.

  “I’m so sad, Mom,” she says, and though this word doesn’t mean what she wants it to, when her mother places both her hands over Ava’s eyes, catching wet and salt from her tears, Ava feels like her mother knows exactly what she means.

  When people ask what happened to her friend—whenever she mentions Kiera, recounting some silly thing they used to do, tame things people won’t hurt to hear—she’ll think back to gym class, that first time they met. When they ask her, How did your friend die? she’ll tell them, She drowned.

  In time, Kiera’s broken body on the hotel concrete is not what she returns to when she thinks of her friend, and she’ll think of Kiera often, especially in such moments where she is now and forever first and only—first high, first car accident, first sex. (That particular bit of guilt will settle and smooth into something like peace.) On her wedding night, she’ll dance chest-to-chest with her husband—a man whom she’s not sure but thinks she loves. A man who sees her, and doesn’t try to tell her what she needs. Swaying close, their bodies generating comfortable warmth, Ava will remember a day near thirteen’s end.

  On what would have been her friend’s fourteenth birthday, she snuck into Kiera’s backyard and down to the retention pond to watch the sun set, water and sky burning pink; to stand on the same bank where she and Kiera had scared the tadpoles, where they had laughed and preened. The place where they—two monsterish girls—had owned the entire world. After the sun slipped under the lip of the horizon, Ava left the way she came, tripping up into the backyard, the sky darkening, all quiet until she heard something small and strangled cutting through the dusk. Kiera’s mom was slumped in a patio chair in the corner of the yard, face in her hands, bathrobe twisted around her, exposing one milky, blue-veined
thigh.

  This is the image Ava returns to on her wedding night and many others: walking toward Kiera’s mother; standing in front of the woman and placing a hand on her shoulder; how her mother’s whole body seemed concave, as if consuming itself. She’ll think of the way she opened the woman’s robe and pressed her body into hers, their skin suctioning together where it touched, forming a seal. How she stayed there, silent, as time collapsed around them, wondering if Kiera’s mother could feel her daughter’s blood pumping hard in her veins—a howling, creating heat.

  Feast

  There is only moonlight, a spill of it across Heath’s shoulders, illuminating how he lies on his side, turned from me, and also the pair of miniscule hands floating above the curtain rod, the fingers small as the tines of a doll’s silver fork. When I call my husband’s name, my voice splinters from my throat and Heath wakes immediately, turns on the bedside lamp, leans in so close I can smell the sleep on his breath. He checks my pupils, then lays the cool back of his hand against my forehead.

  “Do you have any pain?” he asks, and I want to swallow my mouth—to fold in my lips and chew until they burst—to keep myself from laughing. I place my hands on my stomach and nod. Heath reaches underneath my sleep shirt to test the tenderness of my skin.

  “What hurts?” His fingers keep pressing, like I’m clay.

  “Everything,” I say.

  He looks at me then, and in the look I can see him envisioning how I will be at some point in the future, ten years from now or twenty. I am a vague imprint of the girl he’d thought I was when we married, my mouth a black cave, ugly and squared.

  “Rayna, you’re fine,” Heath says. “Everything’s okay. It was a nightmare.” He turns the light back out, and I don’t correct him, don’t mention the tiny hands that are still climbing up and down the drapes. We are both pretending. It’s the only way we sleep.

  This thing with the body parts makes sense to me, this fixation with scale; I blame all those baby tracker apps for that, measuring the growth of my child as compared to produce—kumquats and Brussels sprouts, pomegranate seeds, green lentils—except instead of roots, it was growing a brain and tongue, eyebrows, a thumb to suck. Briefly, I’d been in love with it.

  Heath and I had been married for three years, and he had this whole other child, this ex-wife, a past life that had nothing to do with me. I had my friends’ questions (When y’all having kids of your own?) and my mother’s proclamations (That baby’s gonna have good hair!). I had two hands held out, waiting to receive my due. I’d wanted a honeymoon baby, a curly-haired kid with golden skin and Heath’s hazel eyes. While I waited, I would practice with his child. Out together at dinner, I’d wind a strand of Nila’s hair behind her ear, tell her not to eat so fast, introduce her as our daughter.

  Nine months ago, when I missed my period, when I confirmed with the pee stick and the doctor, when I told Heath over a bottle of expensive champagne and a card that read Daddy, I was glowing from the inside out. This baby validated me in the same way as my master’s degree, my good credit; Heath’s getting down on one knee. I bought the baby books, browsed the best cribs, shunned the million things expectant mothers should shun. Rule-by-rule, I was everything I was supposed to be—twice as good for half as much.

  The baby was the size of a Washington cherry, with miniature sex organs even a skilled technician couldn’t see, when I lost it. There’d been no symptoms, it was too small for fluttering, and when I went to the appointment, the milestone when embryo became fetus, the doctor told me she was sorry, her face solemn and practiced. There was no heartbeat. It was, and then it wasn’t.

  “This is common in early pregnancy,” she’d told me. “It happens all the time. Once the fetus is out, and you begin ovulating, you can try again.” The fetus, she’d said, and the word I’d been so excited about minutes earlier soured.

  I opted out of the D&C and the pill, waiting for things to proceed “naturally.” There was still hope inside of me. Doctors were wrong all the time. I prodded my slim belly, shook it, willing my baby to move. “Wake up, baby,” I commanded, but the next day, the bleeding started and didn’t stop. The doctor said, It’s beginning, and there was nothing to do. Heath kissed my forehead, tried to fold me into his arms, but I couldn’t let him hold me. I locked myself in the bathroom with the baby books, flipping through them carefully, and nowhere was it written how to reverse time or spark a heartbeat. How to make a womb worthy. I tore the pages out in handfuls and flushed them down the toilet, watched as they swirled back up in soggy clumps and came to rest at my feet. Later, in the shower, my baby would come out that way.

  I saw the first baby part in a bouquet of marigolds Heath brought home that night, the small slit of sex resting among the petals—a girl. I was afraid to blink, in case it disappeared. She was with me, talking to me, which meant maybe I could talk back. I was glad to see her, even in this way; if a tiny ear appeared, I’d whisper into it how much she’d been wanted. But over time, these signs began to feel less like benedictions, more like blame. I didn’t tell Heath; this was for me, and I didn’t need a psychiatrist to understand what these visions were—a reminder of how the baby would have developed if she were still safe inside of me.

  The moon has been replaced by the buttery glow of midafter­noon sun when I’m woken by my phone ringing. I know without looking it’ll be my mother or Heath. By now, no one else bothers to call.

  “Hello.”

  “You’re still in bed,” Heath says. Not a question.

  “Yes.”

  The college has been kind, allowing me to stretch the interpretation of “sick leave” these last few months, as long as the job gets done. I’ve covered my bases diligently: all accounts manned, no client left untended. Mostly I work from home, running formulaic programs that allow financial aid to go through so students can buy their textbooks and birth control, stock their shelves with Top Ramen. But Heath knows my primary post is my bed, my real work the practice of forgetting through sleep.

  “You have to pick Nila up from school today.”

  I bring my free hand to my face and examine the fingers, the pinkish white of my nails, the frayed cuticles holding them in place. I bring them to my mouth and bite away the excess skin.

  “Are you there?” Heath asks, and I hear an edge of worry in his voice, expertly mixed with a dash of irritation—our most common cocktail these days.

  “Yes,” I say, still gnawing. My stomach rumbles.

  “Rayna . . . you promised you would spend the day with her.” He pauses, and the space between us hisses with static, his wishes and mine distorted through the phone lines. “Please,” Heath says, and I sigh. Now that I’m pitiful, I’m a sucker for beggars.

  “I’m getting up,” I tell him. I work up a spit in my mouth, swallow the torn-off skin.

  I park on the street, outside the circle of mothers and fathers corralled along the drive marked for child pick-up. The children are hazy with movement, erratic bits of color sprinting from the school, waving papers, some carrying retro plastic lunch boxes, the kind I used to beg my mother for. Everything always comes back. The children screech like seabirds and collide with their parents with the same energy as waves meeting the shore. I shield my eyes and search for Nila in the crowd.

  I see her among all the others at the edge of the curb, her tongue poked out in concentration, looking for me. At the sight of her, a pang starts up in my stomach, a kind of knocking, some feeling asking to be acknowledged. My hand is on the keys and the gas tank marked full. It would be easy to drive away before I’m spotted. I could vanish—follow the wet summery air down an unfamiliar highway and try to escape the little legs dancing on my kitchen counter, or the lungs the size of kidney beans wheezing from the nightstand. I imagine cracked earth; giant saguaro; the hot air drying the farther west I ride and the sun sinking red. Out there, I would track vipers through the bleached sand and lie beneath t
he moon’s cool regard, my belly full and swaying with meat. The coyotes would sing my lullaby.

  I pull the key from the ignition and get out of the car, cross the street, and hold my hand high. I wave. It’s been almost five weeks since I’ve seen her, and I’d forgotten her six-year-old’s exuberance, the brightness of her hair, that she loves me. She throws her arms around my waist, and her stomach, soft and plump, pushes against me. I hold her away from my body at the shoulders, look into her face, and feel nothing but appetite.

  “Let’s get some food,” I say, trying on a smile, a stretched thing.

  At the car, I buckle Nila into the backseat and she tells me about Jupiter’s moons and clouds of space dust where stars are born. She tells me about gravity, how it keeps us pinned to Earth and makes apples fall from trees. “We did drawings today,” she says, and promises to show me later. I know what I’m supposed to say, but can’t. I am a dead satellite, picking up information but relaying nothing back. She’s a smart kid, she senses this. She tells me she missed me, and because I’m trying, because I love her, I lie.

  “I missed you, too,” I say, and guide the car onto the road.

  Heath and the ex-wife have agreed Nila must eat vegetables with every meal, a helping of fresh fruit and whole grains with little allowance for processed junk. I order bacon cheeseburgers and large fries at Wendy’s and we eat them in the parking lot, sharing a chocolate Frosty between us, dipping our fries into it, getting brain freeze as the cold saturates our teeth. I let her gulp down my orange soda between sloppy, open-mouthed bites, flick away the bit of hamburger and bread left on the straw like a flea.

  “Our secret,” I tell her with a cartoon wink.

  “Can we go to the toy store after?”

  I recognize the hard bargain, the first experiment with parental blackmail, and don’t resist. From the early childhood development books I’d devoured, I know this type of thing is natural. A sign of normal growth. At the toy store, I give her a quarter, watch her insert it into the crank of a dilapidated gumball machine and grin as the ball spirals down the chute into her waiting hand. I watch her mouth become a red ruin as she chews, her small, perfect teeth smeared with candy blood.