Milk Blood Heat Read online

  We do Nila’s homework at the dining room table; she’s still babbling, her mind a constant river, surging forward, changing course. Unlike her father, she requires only modest participation. She tells me that the only place as strange as space is the sea. Heath will be home in an hour, no more than two, and then I can escape this, crawl into my bed and lie naked beneath the sheets. I scribble gray spirals in the margins of her papers with one of her fat school pencils and imagine myself disappearing.

  “Look,” Nila says, fetching a construction paper cube from her backpack, pride glowing in the focused point of her face. The cube is only slightly smushed. “I made this.” Its six sides are different colored papers taped together and each one bears a face drawn in Magic Marker and Crayola.

  “Here’s Mommy and Daddy and me,” she says, rotating it so I can see. Heath’s side is the blue of robin’s egg and his eyebrows hover like two hyphens above his squiggle hair. He seems surprised to find himself rendered in his daughter’s careful hand. There’s Maui, her French bulldog, with a happy lolling tongue. I’m there too, depicted on yellow, my mouth a seedless watermelon slice. I could be laughing or screaming.

  Nila holds the last side out like a gift, and there on pink, another body part. She’s drawn a generic baby’s head: there’s a halo and bird’s wings where a neck should be, and its eyes are closed, as if in peace. I can feel her expectancy, her need for my approval, for me to say Thank you or Nice work. She’s waiting for me to be the mother.

  I run to the hallway bathroom and vomit into the toilet. I do it again, and again, until there is only bile, the same cautionary shade as my stick-figure face. I can hear Nila outside the door, the fear in her voice as she calls to me and brushes against the knob. “Don’t come in!” I say. I flush the toilet and climb into the tub.

  I know I should go to her, should comfort her and tell her I’m fine, but I can’t see her right now. I’m tired of smiling when Heath sides with the doctors, says we can try again soon, as if life is interchangeable, one indistinguishable from another. Right now I can’t pretend that I’m okay or that Nila is mine. There is no make-believe that makes me less horrible, that changes the fact that all day I have wondered why Nila is here—her living, breathing, tangible form—while my baby is not.

  Heath’s home. His deep voice reaches me through the bathroom door, a soothing rumble. In the pauses between, I know Nila is filling him in on our day, directing him to my presence behind the door. He pokes his head in and when he sees me curled in the tub, his face clouds. I feel bad for him, but not bad enough to explain. “How long has she been out here by herself?” he asks, and I shrug.

  “Is the house burned down?”

  A muscle tenses in his cheek. “We’ll talk when I get back,” he says, and closes the door behind him. I can hear him pacing, gathering Nila’s things before packing her into his car to take her home.

  When he returns, half an hour later, moving with the heaviness of a much larger man, I’m waiting at the front door, ready for the fight. “Did you tell her I was fine before you dropped her off?”

  He closes his eyes, moves past me into the living room. “When will you be able to let this go? When can we get back to normal?”

  “Let this go?” I spark like a star in the night, feeling suddenly full to the brim. “I’m glad this is so easy for you.”

  “Jesus, Rayna! I don’t know what to do. It’s been eight months.” He grips the bridge of his nose. “I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying what everyone’s told you already. It’s common! It happens all the time. It wasn’t even . . .” He stops. Looks like he wishes he hadn’t come back. “We didn’t even know what it was.”

  But I knew—soft petals shimmering gold, my baby girl. And I wanted my common pain.

  “Maybe you never wanted me to have it. Too afraid to tarnish that pure family blood,” I jeer, and Heath’s face twists. I can feel the thin line I’m towing, about to cross over, but this anger is delicious, satisfying as a last meal, and I can’t stop eating of myself. “Maybe you’re actually happy. After all, you already have your perfect daughter.”

  “That’s enough!” Heath roars. He steps forward and grabs me at the wrists, and if he were a different sort of man, I can see how this might go. But Heath just looks at me like he can’t tell who I am, like he wouldn’t want to know me. His breath comes hard until the anger softens, and when he lets out a little whimper, a window opens, and through it, for the first time, I can sense his sadness, his jagged need. Stunned, I watch him swallow it. “How dare you,” he whispers, and I’m ashamed.

  I lean my forehead against Heath’s and he doesn’t move away. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.” I wish I could pin this loss on Nila, on anything, but there’s no explanation, no one to blame. I know it’s not her fault or Heath’s, maybe not even my own. I kiss Heath until he kisses me back, until we’re undressing and he’s pressed close against my skin. We’ve needed this; missed it. There are so many ways to be filled. “Please please please,” I beg over and over, like it’s the only word I know.

  I say it the way I did when the baby fell out, warmed by body heat and shower steam, the color of raw life. Red globules, liver-streaked, clots the size of champagne grapes. And then a slippery, silvery sac, small as a coin. My baby in pieces, fig-dark and glistening. Before I hunched empty under the showerhead, letting the water grow cold; before I slid the sac into a Ziploc; before Heath drove me to the hospital, I picked up my baby and cradled it, tried to see if I could make out a face or a miniature knee in the alien landscape of my insides. I rocked my baby in my hands, told it everything was going to be fine. I knew already what a mother should do.

  Nila said, The only place as strange as space is the sea, so the next morning, I drive to the city aquarium and buy a ticket. The halls shimmer, filled with a dense, amphibious silence. Here it’s safe to wander, to be driftless. I pretend to goggle at the flitting of fluorescent fish, to be consumed with nothing more than the wavering of sea kelp stretching up toward artificial light. At the tide pools I trail my finger along an urchin’s purple spines and watch it shudder, blindly grasping until I still my finger in the middle of it, let it hold me.

  Suddenly, the aquarium is teeming with children, a first-grade field trip. The kids rush in, trailed by frazzled teachers, their eyes wide and hands reaching, grasping as the urchin. At once I want to hold them, press their small chests against mine and feel that vital thump. The children awe at the boneless creatures resting at the bottom of the shallow tank, and their joy is simple, tactile, too much. Feeling unworthy of them, I fade away to seek out darker, more solitary spaces.

  In a dim room where the water seems heaviest, I rest my head against the glass. For a moment, I can almost remember what it is to be unborn—this darkness, this weight, a comfort. Then, something stirs in the water, stealing my attention. In a corner of the tank, hidden by living rock, rests an octopus—iridescent orange with blue rings spiraling up the trunk of its body. Slowly, golden eye unblinking, it feeds a tentacle into the black of its mouth. Its other arms wave, two or three of them shortened, partially eaten already. I can feel its stolid regard, and like the body parts, I know this is meant for me. A synchronicity; something about ashes and rebirth, Ouroboros eating his own tail.

  “Hey!” a man next to me says, a middle-aged father in glasses towing a child in each hand. He had snuck up while I’d been transfixed; maybe my engrossment brought him. He gathers the attention of a nearby worker. “Something’s wrong with this squid!” Nosey, ignorant man; he can’t even tell the difference.

  I press closer to the tank and my reflection superimposes over the animal, my eyes a dark glinting on its body. The man is panicking, perceiving madness or danger—some invisible, toxic signal radiating across the current. But I know this act is natural, a truth beneath it, muscled and gleaming; I had heard the creature speak. Sometimes you must consume the
damaged body, digest it cell by cell, to taste the new beginning.

  I lean in, lips almost to glass, before the onlookers come to gawk, before the workers can interrupt this godly process, and look into its eye.

  “Good,” I tell the octopus. “Like that. One bite at a time.”

  Tongues

  Ms. Addler keeps a word-of-the-day calendar on her desk, so in fourth period, while Zeyah tunes out her teacher’s prattle on American history, she learns new words: censure, vicissitude, caliginous, exegesis. Slick words, shape-shifting, Zey devours them, voracious.

  Learn something every day, Ms. Addler’s always saying. Her teacher is young, Call-Me-Katie outside the classroom, red lipstick and stitched flowers on her garter-topped stockings that show when she crosses her legs. Once, Zey saw her French-kiss a man after school, then hop into his nice car, her grin spread large as if she, too, were a high school senior, seventeen.

  Today’s word is luciferous, and Zey pronounces it wrong. No, Ms. Addler says, loo-SIF-fur-us. But Zey can’t ignore the prefix. She knows Lucifer: fallen angel, Prince of Darkness. Little horned man on the candy cigarette box. How could this word mean light? Ms. Addler says, There are all kinds of things “they” don’t want you to know. She says it real mysterious, like some slim, blonde-haired prophet—but this idea, that word, quickens in Zey, growing big in the eternal Southern heat.

  At home she takes her dictionary into the bathroom—locks the door, a blasphemy—to see what it knows about the devil. She seeks a different opinion than what Pastor or her family’s Sunday Bible have to offer: 1) a proud, rebellious archangel, identified as Satan, who fell from Heaven. 2) the planet Venus when appearing as the morning star. 3) (lowercase) a friction match.

  At New Life First Baptist that Sunday—Zey and her brother bookended by their parents in the pew—Duck slips his fingers into hers and tickles her palm, their signal for boredom, for something funny or ridiculous an adult has said. Duck is twelve, still accepting of his nickname and blessedly silly. Zey remembers him small, head smooth as a pebble, her mother placing him in her arms. How sweet he’d felt, yawning mouth, breath scented with their mother’s milk. He was hers in a way nothing else was. Duck sings along with the hymns, he always does, intentionally off-key, but this time Zey isn’t bored; she doesn’t sing. Instead, she watches: the collection plate going round once, twice; Pastor roaring at the pulpit, royal purple trailing from his arms; people asking for blessings, to be touched by the Spirit, falling out when Pastor presses his thumb hard between their eyes.

  She listens to Pastor’s words: Brothers and Sisters, all those who accept me as the Savior shall live forever in the Kingdom of Heaven! Repent! He whips the air as if spurring something invisible. Benediction or absolution—his necessary position in the power of such things. The congregation writhes. In the pew in front of them, Sister Ruth in her flower-box hat slumps backward, speaking in tongues, this strange language flowing from the deep place where the soul lives, waiting for God to free it. The long, stray hairs under her chin tremble; her grown daughter fans her face. Others catch the Spirit, the Ghost licking through the church like flame. Pastor says, Bow your heads, let us pray, and Zey looks at them all with their faces turned down, eyes closed; the congregation, her mother, father, and Duck. Only she and Pastor keep their eyes open, and Zey examines him, the copper skin sweating from his exultations, the way he searches the room, bowed head to bowed head, as if measuring the effect of his influence. When his eyes find hers, Zey snaps her head down, too late, and doesn’t look up again until the congregation says amen. On the drive home, Zey translates the expression she’d seen flash across Pastor’s face—supercilious, enigmatic. Hungry.

  After Bible study the following week, while her mother makes her rounds in her newest Sunday best, Pastor invites her into the cramped space of his office, which seems to double as storage. Boxes labeled “Christmas” and “Communion” hulk around his desk, and as Zey reads the words, she pictures their contents: Mary and the black baby Jesus in the manger; bulk orders of cheap wine and wafers of Christ’s dry, tasteless flesh. She sits in the chair in front of his desk and Pastor asks, Are you godly, girl? She doesn’t know how to answer. He then tells Zey how to be a woman—soft-spoken, subservient, devout, and clean. He reminds her about the history of Eve, how she took of the tree of knowledge, seduced her husband, and struck the entire world with her sin. How she doomed mankind to suffering, because she didn’t know her place. Zey gnaws the inside of her lip while he speaks. A trapped fly whines in the window.

  Her mother learned how to be a woman here, in the faith, and her father a man, but Zey’s been to the library and looked up real history—slave ships and witch trials and women kept in bare feet. The books she borrowed were full of words like pay-gap and redline, and she noticed that in all genres, no matter literature or biography, men’s fury stained the pages, sowing lies like white seeds inside of people’s hearts. Pastor rises, squeezing around the clutter, and perches on the desk, his feet resting on either side of Zey’s. He leans down and places a heavy hand on her bare knee. We need good young girls—God-fearing girls like you—to be the backbone of our church. Do you understand? he asks, and his fingers flex.

  Zey hears Pastor’s message and understands what’s beneath it: that she can have hair on her head but not in her armpits; hair on her arms but not her legs; hair between her legs . . . depending on what a man liked. That she can be looked on, but not look. Zey stares into his face, her eyes filling, heart hammering in her throat. She says nothing, cannot move until he moves, will not cry in front of him. Finally, she looks down and Pastor sits back, releasing her. He opens the door for her to leave. God blesses you, child, he tells her.

  Zey turns the moment over in her mind—at school and at home and even while she sleeps. For two Sundays, she sits stricken between her parents and even Duck can’t break her free. What did it mean that Pastor, a pinnacle, the link to the Supreme, would bother to threaten her, unimportant though she is? He is Simon to so many: he says Rejoice, and they do; Repent, and they do. He says Pray, and the church goes blind.

  For English, their teacher assigns The Scarlet Letter—the most boring book about an affair Zey has ever read. Her teacher asks the class what they noticed in the interactions between Hester and the town. Most of Zey’s classmates only stare; they fidget and avert their eyes. Then someone says, They hated her.

  Yes! the teacher booms, startling them to attention. But why? Papers rustle in the silence. Because she was immoral? another student tries, and the teacher cocks his head, his way of questioning an answer without claiming that it’s wrong. Think about it as it applies to our own lives, our world, he says. What is the nature of hate? What’s it useful for? And Zey imagines the townspeople, their whispers and cruel laws, their narrowed eyes. How they ostracized the woman, conspired to contain her light.

  They were scared of her, Zey tells the teacher, realizing it as she speaks, and he jabs a finger in her direction. Yes! Exactly that, he says. Now he’s getting excited, pacing before their desks, and Zey tilts forward in her seat, angling closer to his truth. Hate, he continues, is almost always a cover for some perceived psychological threat—our guilt or pain. Our fear. And how do we treat things of which we are afraid?

  The moment with Pastor tumbles round with the grit of Zey’s learnings, chipping down until her understanding of it gleams. After the next Sunday service, as Pastor jokes with Duck and accepts praise from her parents, he lays that same hand on her shoulder, and Zey glares at it and then at Pastor before she shrugs it off. He covers the moment with a laugh, but the hand becomes a fist at his side.

  Pastor phones her parents that night just before dinner and though Zey doesn’t know what’s said, later she’ll imagine him on the other side of the line spinning his lie, toad-like and sullen as he exacts his revenge. After she hangs up, her mother slaps her at the table and calls Zey outside her name­—­embarrassment, disgra
ce, demimonde. Disrespecting the pastor? What kind of example are you? Duck hides in the hallway, listening; Zey sees his shadow on the wall. Her mother says, What you do reflects on me!

  Zey tries to explain, to defend herself against her mother’s rage, her own coursing underneath, but her mother’s so ashamed, so unwilling to see. She sends Zey to her room without dinner while her father watches from the living room, complicit in his silence.

  Under the covers that night, her bedroom door taken from its hinges, Zey thinks of Ms. Addler, curled around the body of her lover like a snake, soft in her sin. She wishes she could ask her parents if it’s better to be a sinner or a prisoner, but she knows now that her mother is afraid of truth and her father wouldn’t recognize it, even if it invited him inside, offered fresh fruit.

  Zey rebels against her parents for their failure to believe her, to protect her, in any small way she can. She refuses food, both physical and spiritual; she won’t step foot inside the church. She lets their punishments slide off her back. Zey makes Lucifer a mantra, speaking the name aloud, blurring it until it becomes nothing more than the language of hisses, her own version of tongues. The vibration fills her stripped room, sinking into the walls and passing through to her brother, who is sad Mama and Pop now leave Zey home on Sundays. He overhears their confusion at her behavior. Their mother wonders if they should send her away.

  Duck sneaks into Zey’s room one night, climbing into bed with her, like he used to when he was small. Zey can feel him trying to word his question about why things aren’t how they used to be: Zey packing his lunches with folded notes or borrowing Pop’s car to run an errand to the grocery. He could come-with as long as he sat in the backseat, wore his seat belt, listened to his sister. Now, their parents hover like buzzards and only in the dark hours are they free.