The Push

We walk to preschool together and she waves at me from behind the gate. I miss her all day in the back of my mind. She makes me a card for Mother’s Day with words she came up with, something the teacher prints for her, and it makes me weepy when I open it. I do not feel dread when I pick her up at the end of the day.

She smiles at me. She hugs my legs. I ask her for kisses.

She cares for him like a baby doll. She touches his head while she holds him. She watches me feed him and she cuddles up beside us and wants to share in the warmth of our bodies. I do not wish he and I were alone without her. She talks about him when he’s not there. She tells strangers about him. Every once in a while, she asks if we can go to the park alone because she misses time with just me. We do, and we swing side by side, and get vanilla ice cream cones. We go home and he is waiting for us, safe with you. I do not quietly pretend that he is my only child.

She sits on my bed while I get changed and we talk about things mothers and daughters talk about. I am gentle, and I am warm. She is curious. She likes to be near me. Her eyes are soft. I trust her. I trust myself to be around her. I watch her grow into a young woman who is respectful and kind. Who feels like she is mine. We have a son and she has a brother. We love them both equally. We are a family of four who eats the same kind of dinner every Sunday, who argues over which television show to watch on Fridays, who goes road-tripping on spring break.

I do not spend my days wondering who we could have been.

Or what life would be like if she had died instead of him.

I am not a monster, and neither is she.



55



You’d gone to buy more sunscreen from the shop in the hotel lobby. We never did well with beach vacations; we burned too easily. But we were trying to be a normal family. Your mother suggested we go, that a change of scene would be good for us, and so you booked it. Violet loved to play in the sand, even at the age of nine. I read a novel under our striped umbrella and lifted the floppy brim of my hat every so often to check on her. She was digging a maze of canals to fill with water. A skin-and-bones boy, no older than three, lingered between her and the lap of the ocean, picking at the corner of his thumb.

She tiptoed over and crouched at his feet, the wind carrying their voices away from me. He looked like he was giggling. She toppled over with a silly look on her face and he laughed toward the sun. He followed her, and she handed him a bucket to help her fill the canals.

His mother had an elegance I’d admired when I saw her earlier that day near the pool.

“What a doll your daughter is, to be entertaining him like that. Does she babysit yet?”

I explained she looked older than she was. I invited her to have a seat on your empty lounge chair while the two of them played. We watched our children and exchanged the kind of pleasantries you do with other mothers. The boy looked up and called for her, waving, showing her the bucket he’d been given.

“I see, I see! How nice, Jakey!” They were there for the week. She had two other children who were on a boat for the day with their father, but she and Jake were prone to seasickness. Violet began burying him in the sand. His legs first. Then his torso. She patted the sand, smoothed it out over the mound, as the boy held as still as he could.

“Do you mind?” she asked, holding up her phone.

She had to make a call for work but the beach was too windy. She ran up to the boardwalk behind us and I watched the way her white caftan blew around her long legs.

The boy was buried up to his chin now, his hot, round head like a cherry dropped in the sand. Violet ran to the water and filled the largest bucket and walked slowly back to him, her arms shaking. How could she have carried such a heavy bucket? I sat up in my chair. She held the bucket over his head and her chest rose. She paused and looked up to see if I was watching. I stared back, my heart beating. The boy’s eyes were closed. I scrambled to stand. Some water splashed out as she shifted to put one hand under the bucket. She was going to turn it over. There must have been a gallon of water, it would fill his airway in an instant. She stared at him, still, her hand ready to tip it. My legs went weak underneath me and I tried to yell but nothing came out. I hit my chest, trying to find my voice. And then finally I screamed. His name came out, barely audible, the pitch like fire in my throat.

“Sam!”

“What’s wrong?” Your hand on my arm startled me and I swatted you away. Violet stood staring at us, the bucket down by her side. The boy craned his neck and the sand cast cracked like ice around him.

“You ruined it!”

“I’m sorry,” he said and started to whimper.

She dropped to her knees and helped him up, brushing the sand from his back and his fine blond hair. “Don’t cry. We can do it again. Are you okay?” Her hand draped around his little shoulders and he nodded. She looked over at me briefly, wanting to see if I was watching her still.

“Nothing,” I said to you finally, and adjusted the bottom of my bathing suit. My heartbeat shook my chest. I watched her trying to cheer the boy up. Maybe I’d overreacted. I thought again of her pink mittens pushing the stroller and then quickly batted the image away. You handed me the plastic bag and seemed untroubled—you hadn’t heard me say his name. Or at least you pretended not to.

We stayed for two more hours. I finished reading my book. You flew a kite with the kids. We ate dinner that night with the boy’s family, the elegant mother and her three seersuckered sons.