The Push

I walked home briskly, with my coat clutched at my chest. I brought up the suitcases from the basement. I packed all of your clothes neatly inside and zipped them shut. I called a moving company and booked four large packing bins and a small moving van to arrive the next day. I found a pad of sticky notes in your desk drawer and I walked through the house and stuck one on each item we shared that I wanted you to take: the small rolling island in the kitchen, the record player, the set of dishes from your parents, the runner in the front hallway that had marks from the shoes you never took off when I asked you to, the sofa in the living room that had been imprinted with the shape of your ass for years, the green glass vase, the chopping board stained with the blood of red meat, the chairs you commissioned for the dining-room table that hurt everyone’s backs, all the furniture in your den, and most of the art in the house. And then I went to the closet in your den and found the tin of blades. I took the longest one and wrapped it in a silk scarf, and I put it in my bottom drawer.

“I don’t care where you stay tonight. Just come back tomorrow to pack everything else.” I even kissed you good-bye, a habit, a reflex of a married woman. As I walked up the stairs I thought of Sam’s things. Everything we kept that had belonged to him was in boxes in the basement. Maybe you would want something—a blanket, a toy. Maybe I should ask you. Maybe you were owed the faint smell of him still lingering in the fabric after nearly three years. I turned on the tap of the bath and took my clothes off. The sound of the water had muffled your footsteps and so the sight of you in the doorway startled me. I clutched my breasts and turned away. You felt like an intrusion now. All those years, and now you felt like a stranger.

“What about Violet?” You didn’t take your eyes off me as I stepped into the tub. The water was too hot, but I forced myself lower.

“What about her? This is your doing. You can figure out what to tell her.”

You looked up and away, as you did whenever I said something that made you wish I wasn’t so stubborn or vague or difficult or indecisive. Or flippant. Or sarcastic. Those were some of the things you didn’t like me to be. You rubbed your forehead. I seemed to make you tired. I seemed to make you wish I hadn’t ever existed at all.

“I’ve tried my best to keep this from her because I don’t want her to think badly of you. I don’t want things between you two to change,” I said. “But I think she knows.”

I waited for your reaction. I wanted you to be grateful to me, to concede that you were the one doing this to us. But all you said was:

“I want to share custody. And split the time evenly.”

“Fine.”

You watched me slip into the tub until my whole body was magnified under the water. You stared at me, the woman you’d been inside for twenty years. I wondered if you might try to come in with me. If despite all my faults, all the ways I disappointed you, you still wanted to feel my skin one last time. I looked up and felt nothing for you—not love, not hate, not anything in between. Is this what the end was supposed to feel like? There are people who work through it, who fight for one another, who do it for the children. The life they thought they needed. But I had nothing to fuel the fire. Nothing to give.

And then what you said hit me—shared custody. I’d be alone with her. That’s what you had meant when you’d asked, “What about Violet?” You’d meant, “What about you and Violet, what about the life you’ll have to endure together without me? What about the days you don’t speak to each other, what about the nights she needs someone, and you just won’t do? What about the times she knows you’re pretending to care as much as you should? Who will believe her? Who will defend her? Who will comfort her? Who will light her up in the morning when she wakes? Who will love her on those days when she’s alone with you and needs to know everything will be okay? Who will believe her?”

You stood in your jeans and your gray sweater with your hands in your pockets and you watched me. Bare. Inadequate. I met your puncturing eyes.

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m her mother.”



61



Our brains are always watching. Looking for danger—a threat could come at any time. Information comes in and it does two things: it hits our consciousness, where we can observe and remember it. And it hits our subconscious, where a little almond-shaped section of the brain called the amygdala filters it for signs of danger. We can sense fear in less time than it takes for us to be aware of what we are seeing or hearing or smelling—just twelve-thousandths of a second. We respond so fast that it can happen before we’re consciously aware that something is wrong. Like if we see a car coming. Like if we see someone about to get hit.

Reflexes. They tell you about the most natural reflex in the world when you give birth to your baby—the oxytocin reflex. The mothering hormone. It makes the milk flow, fill ducts, stream into the baby’s mouth. It starts to work when the mother expects she needs to feed. When she smells or touches or sees her baby. But it also affects a mother’s behavior. It makes her calm, it reduces her stress. And it makes her like her baby. It makes her look at her baby and want to keep him alive.

There was a viral video circulating online of a famous woman, a young British aristocrat the tabloids loved, and her rambunctious young son. Three different times she’s catching him in perilous moments—swooping in to grab his hand as he falls down the wet steps of an airplane, yanking the neck of his shirt on the slippery bow of a yacht, pulling him back from a polo pony’s path in the nick of time. Like a viper snapping a mouse in the clutches of her jaw. The instincts of a mother. Even that mother—flanked with nannies, brooched and heeled, with a fascinator pinned to her curls.