My mother never told me about the night I was made. What I know I learned after she was gone, from a green notebook at the bottom of a box of her old school notes, and from the distance between what its pages said and what she had let me believe. The rest I have filled in myself. I have had a long time to do it. If I have the streetlight wrong, or the stone in her shoe, I hope she forgives me. I could not stand to leave her sitting in the dark with no one watching.
1
She did not know how long she had been sitting in the dirt.
The first thing she noticed was the cold. Not the night or the road or the houses with their windows shut against her, but a cold inside her clothes, as if the air had followed her in. She sat on the edge of a concrete step with her hands between her knees, staring at a dark patch on the ground. For a long time she thought it was a hole. Slowly she understood it was only wet earth, and she looked away.
At the end of the road a streetlight buzzed, went dark, buzzed again. She began to count. Five seconds of light. Five of dark. It gave her mind something to do.
One shoe had slipped off her heel, and a small stone had worked its way inside. She felt it every time she moved her foot. She did not take the shoe off. She could not make herself touch anything that belonged to her.
A dog barked beyond the houses and she flinched, then waited. Nothing came. She looked at her hands. They were shaking, so she closed them, and that did not help, so she opened them again.
She thought about washing. Not her hands only. Her clothes, her hair, her skin, which no longer felt like hers. Everything on her felt crowded, and she wanted to peel it all off and leave it on the step with the stone and the wet earth and the whole night. She wanted a place where none of it had happened. She wanted to wake in her own bed and find that her mind had made the evening up while she slept.
She wanted her mother.
The thought came so suddenly she nearly laughed. She was old enough to know she could not become a child again just because she needed one.
When she finally stood, her knees almost gave way, and she caught herself against the wall. There was a crack in the plaster. She put two fingers into it, then took them out.
She walked home slowly and did not look behind her. There was no face to remember, no name, nothing she could point to. Only the dark, and the knowledge that someone had been in it with her. That was almost worse.
At home she went straight to the bathroom and locked the door. Her mother called from the sitting room.
"Is that you?"
She did not answer.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes." The lie came so easily that it frightened her a little.
She turned on the tap and stared at the water hitting the basin. "Did you eat?" her mother called. She opened her mouth and nothing came out. Then she said, "I'm not hungry."
She washed her hands. Once, twice, again. Her fingers turned red and she kept going. The water grew warm and she turned it hotter, until her skin hurt, and only then did she stop and look up into the mirror. She did not recognize the girl looking back. That frightened her more than anything else that night. The room tilted, and she gripped the edge of the basin until it passed.
A calendar hung beside the mirror with her examination dates in blue ink. One was circled in red, two weeks away. She thought of the anatomy diagrams stacked beside her bed, the notes she had made in the margins, the future she had been building one page at a time. Then another thought arrived, quietly, almost politely. What if there is something growing inside me?
"No," she said aloud. It sounded small in the bathroom. "No."
She sat on the tiles with her back against the cabinet and stayed there until her mother stopped calling. Only then did the tears come, all at once, as if the silence had finally given them permission.
She told her mother nothing. She told one person.
Amara arrived the next morning with two oranges and a notebook under her arm. She took one look at her friend and said, "You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome." Amara set the oranges down and sat, and waited, and did not once fill the quiet to be rid of it. Several minutes went by.
"I think I'm pregnant," the girl said.
Amara did not move. Then she shifted closer. "Are you sure?"
"No."
"Then we test first."
Amara reached for her hand. The girl pulled it away, and Amara let her.
The test confirmed it. Afterward they sat on the bathroom floor with the instructions between them. Amara read the paper twice. The girl stared at the little window and the two lines in it. She hated them. She hated whoever had put them there, and herself for being alive, and the room, and the morning sun coming through the curtains as though nothing had changed.
"I can fix it," she said.
"You don't have to decide today."
"I know what I want."
"You're scared."
"Yes."
"You're allowed to be."
The girl looked at the test again. "I don't want to see it."
Amara folded the instructions in half. "We'll find someone."
An appointment was made and the girl wrote the date on the calendar, crossed it out, and wrote it again. For the next several days she went to class and studied and answered questions and laughed when her friends laughed, and tried to behave as though the thing inside her belonged to no one. At night she lay awake with a hand over her stomach, then pulled it away. Once, in the dark, she whispered, "I am sorry." She could not have said whether she was talking to herself or to the child.
The appointment was three days off when she first heard the heartbeat.
It was not supposed to happen. She had gone to a different clinic with Amara only to learn how far along she was, and the doctor was kind, which almost made it worse. He moved the probe and watched his screen while she stared at the ceiling. Then she heard it, quick and uneven, a tiny rhythm. The doctor said something she did not catch. On the screen there was almost nothing to see, a shape, a beginning, something that did not look like a person and sounded like one. She lay very still. Amara squeezed her shoulder.
Outside she walked three streets before she realized she was going the wrong way, away from home. Amara caught up with her.
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know."
The afternoon was hot. People were buying food from stalls, a bus groaned past, somewhere a baby was crying, and she looked toward the sound. Outside a shop a woman stood holding a small boy who had fallen asleep against her shoulder, his hand hanging loose against her shirt. The woman shifted him without waking him. The girl watched. Then she looked away.
"I can't do it," she said.
Amara waited.
"I can't kill it."
The words frightened her the moment they were out. Amara did not correct her. She said only, "Then don't."
"I'll have to leave school."
"Maybe for a while."
"My mother will hate me."
"She won't."
"She'll be ashamed."
"She'll be angry."
"That isn't better."
"No," Amara said. "It isn't."
They stood in the heat. The girl looked down at her stomach, where there was nothing to see, not yet, and laid a hand on it as gently as she might touch a bruise.
"I don't know how to do this."
"Neither do I."
"You're supposed to say something helpful."
"I've known you six years. I can't even keep a plant alive."
Despite herself she laughed. It came out broken, but it came out, and Amara smiled.
"There," Amara said. "You're still in there."
She did not know what kind of mother she would be, or what kind of person she would have to become. She only knew that there was now someone who would never learn what had happened that night unless she chose to tell him. And suddenly that mattered.