I.
You leave Khalil because he hates your body. Khalil hates your body because it can’t hold on to babies. He’s too nice a guy to say it outright, but every night he leaves a gulf between his body and your own, in the same bed that for three years was the site of your joint orgasms. So, you make the decision for both of you and announce that you’ve accepted the job in Poughkeepsie at Lisle College.
He grabs the edge of the counter with one hand and literally leans in to you, eyes squinty. You sit at the Formica counter, sorting files, deciding which to pack, which to toss, keeping your hands busy and your eyes—mostly— away from his face. His nose flares. Ropy dreadlocs threaten to drown his face, something he calls his Jesus look. On any other day, the unwieldy hair that springs from his scalp endears him to you. Today, it only adds to the pall of the conversation. The death of your relationship—like your two babies—is inevitable.
“Let’s try to figure this out,” he says, breathing deeply through his nose. His chest heaves, reminding you of the heart that beats beneath it. You care. Just not enough to stay in that broken apartment anymore.
“I’m sorry.” You look at him. The Vaseline you applied to your lips earlier makes a cheesy line right inside your lower lip which you scrape with the ridges of your teeth. “I don’t think I can see it.” Your voice holds a dismissive lilt—too light.
“Can’t see us?” He crooks his face to the side.
“It’s the flying back and forth. There aren’t any direct flights from Stewart to O’Hare.” You sigh. “Maybe we ought to just face facts—a long-distance thing isn’t tenable right now. I’ll be starting a new job, launching research for the third project. I just won’t have the kind of time you’re expecting and— deserve.”
Khalil makes a noise with his mouth, something like a clicking of his teeth, before taking your face into his hands, forcing you to look him directly in his eyes. “Don’t tell me what I deserve.”
You struggle from his grasp, not because it hurts, but because you don’t like it—and he squints again, like you had become blurry or something. His years as a photographer make him a master at seeing you.
Khalil shakes his head. “I can’t believe the first chance you get, you run off hundreds of miles away.” He paces the floor, making big round movements with his hands. “I don’t know. Here I am thinking we were making a life together. Was I alone?” He touches your arm when you look away. “Don’t you think we should have talked about this before you made a decision to move to . . . Poughkeepsie?” Then he lowers his voice to a whisper like you aren’t the only two people in the 1980s kitchen with the beige backsplash and matching stove. “We can try again, you know.”
You stop fiddling with the files, blink hard. You see from the look on his face that he knows he’s gone too far. You get up and go to the bedroom. A few open boxes in various stages of fullness lay on the floor. Some with only a few shirts and pairs of pants inside.
He’s fast on your heels, obviously remorseful. “Sorry,” Khalil says as he walks. “I didn’t mean to bring it up like that, but it’s true.” He runs his hand over his hair, holding a few locs on top of his head before letting them cascade. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know what to say. Anything, but please don’t run away.”
Clutching beneath your navel, you will yourself into a thick wall of ice, thankful to be leaving Chicago—for good.
You scoff. “I’m only taking a job,” you say with your back to him.
He stuffs his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, hurling his set of keys on the nightstand, the clatter of metal startling you. “This is ridiculous,” he says. Your hands shake even though that’s not what you want them to do.
After Khalil slams the door, you wait a few minutes before running to the front and think of telling him why you can’t stay. But you don’t because you’re afraid he’ll say you’re right. Anyway, his car has already made it to the corner. It hovers for a few minutes before turning.
II.
The day before the movers come to haul away your life, the phone rings.
“It’s Paul,” he says. “From Howard.”
The deep baritone that so often woke you up on the dorm’s extra-long twin mattress is indelibly etched in your memory, but you don’t want to seem presumptuous, reveal that the previous joining of your bodies might have meant more to you than it had to him. Your stomach tightens.
“Don’t be a dick. I know who this is,” you say.
This will always be true.
You used to love Paul. Desperately. You used to have extremely responsible, clumsy-at-first sex which turned into lazy and amazing, pull-out sex— the latter resulting in a pregnancy Paul never even knew happened, one that you did away with so you wouldn’t miss out on that yearlong Fulbright Fellowship to Ghana. You rationalized how you could always have babies later, when you were established in your career.
Flumping on the faded orange twill chair, you take a sip of tepid coffee— Sanka. You already packed the Keurig and you’re desperate. You think about how you and Paul used to sit in the West Towers and drink Sanka and smoke cigarettes and talk shit about Obama’s responsibility to poor black communities. You lick the front of your teeth and think about his teeth—round, crooked on the bottom—his rose-colored gums, his cigarette stained lips. You both thought you were so cool, smoking those fucking You’ve Come a Long Way Baby Virginia Slims when neither of you had gone anywhere yet.
“Same. It’s been a while,” Paul says.
“A few years, anyway.”
“I think it was that African Diaspora Conference in Madrid.”
“Right, and then only in passing,” you say.
Three years ago. You didn’t want to be in Spain or alive really, and you certainly didn’t want to see anyone, least of all Paul. You were still bleeding from the first miscarriage. You saw him, not at the conference itself, but in downtown Madrid, eating tapas with a woman who looked like a frog.
“Hey, Audrey,” he called, half standing, the cloth napkin on his lap falling to the ground.
The sight of him made your uterus cramp—you passed another blood clot. You waved, clawed at your jacket and ran toward the hotel. You must have looked a fright in your brown tweed blazer and gray Champion jogging pants, carrying a cup of gelato in a brown paper bag, moving past an Asian baby girl in a stroller pushed by a Spanish abuelita.
“Audrey, wait,” Paul yelled.
Out the corner of your eye, you thought you saw him jogging to catch up with you or maybe you made that part up. All you know is you left the square faster than a communion disc on a sinner’s tongue.
“Right.” Paul pauses. “I had just gotten the job here at Lisle.”
“Um hm. And I guess I must have just gotten the postdoc at Chicago.”
“We landed well.”
“You landed well. I landed safe,” you say. You had parlayed your postdoc at the University of Chicago into a permanent-like, scholar-in-residence situation, putting off getting a real professorship.
Paul lets out a jaunty laugh. “Now look at us. Did you ever think we’d be at the same school again, working together this time?”
“No,” you say. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t know Paul was at Lisle when you accepted the job in the Political Science Department. You’d followed him quite a bit through the years—two articles in the African American Review, his talk at MLA in Los Angeles. The internet is wondrous that way. Stalkers barely had any work to do anymore.
The other information you learned second hand, rumors from academics you’d met in passing that no one was touching his book on account of its pedestrian analysis. A shame really, but it was typical of the Paul you knew in undergrad. Smart but not inspired, an intellectual lightweight who barely managed a mastery of his field. It was a miracle he was still on faculty, only a matter of time before he was denied tenure. Lisle was the kind of institution that cancelled you, even if there was a flicker of promise. And then he’d be on to a tenure-track at some four-year, teaching a four-four load with no start-up research funds if he was lucky—sunk in a vat of adjunct teaching at community colleges for the rest of his career if he wasn’t.
You’re a better academic than he is—already working on your third book. Lisle offered you the position, courted you—you didn’t even have to apply. But that’s not why you took the job. And you didn’t agree to move to God-awful Poughkeepsie, New York because Paul was there or because you wanted to gloat. You took the position because you had to leave Chicago, the apartment, Khalil, and the ghosts of your dead babies. Khalil was right. You were running away.
“So when are you and your partner coming to Poughkeepsie?” he asks.
You feel a pang. Paul is fishing, seeing if you’re attached. The finality of your decision to leave Khalil behind settles in. You think about Khalil hoisting those keys at you like daggers.
“Um . . . it’s just me. Movers come tomorrow. My flight’s on Sunday.”
Paul jumps right on it, a lightness in his voice. “Why don’t you come here for dinner then? You’ll probably be bushed with all the travelling and we’d love to have you over. Save you a little on food.”
A deluge of old emotional garbage from undergrad mushrooms in your throat. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s nice of you, but I couldn’t possibly impose,” you say.
“Nonsense. I insist. Plus—,” Paul says, pausing, “I’d love to see you. I know Lila would too.”
You burst into a laugh-cough. This is his angle. For you to see that you hadn’t killed him when you broke up right before you left for Ghana. That he had a life and in it someone loved him—that girl he started dating after you, that girl who was as deep as cotton candy, frothy, weightless. You could still make out her heart-shaped face with the small glossed lips (how did she manage blow jobs with those things?), strolling on the yard in wedge sandals and a halter top with a relaxed, shoulder length bob. You had forgotten her name until he mentioned it. Lila. Lila. Lila. Her name made you play games with the tip of your tongue like an idiot.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
You concede with an imperceptible sigh. “Sure. Why not? It’d be great to catch up.”
“Great.” Paul seems relieved. “We’ll see you Sunday, say six? Is that good?”
“Um-hm. Thanks,” you say, though you can’t stop your uterus from aching, the tug from some otherworldly place.
III.
The Uber driver chats on the phone in Twi. You remember the language from your time in Ghana doing research on voting rights and practices in Kumasi. The driver is angry with his wife, something about eggs, or a chicken. Then again, maybe you don’t make out anything. That’s the point of his not speaking English, to make sure you don’t understand him, to make sure you know you’re firmly situated on the outside.
You let him be and roll messages upwards on your phone with your index finger. Meetings all this week. One with the chair of Poli Sci, another with the chair of the Race Center. One with the department admin—you called that one, just to get a feel for her competence. You need to pick up the keys to your office and faculty apartment, have desk copies ordered for your seminar, work on your course syllabus. The details are dizzying. Closing your phone, you take deep, cleansing breaths so you don’t get overwhelmed with starting a new life.
The driver pulls up in front of Paul’s house, and you marvel at the quaint stoniness of it. The house—hell, the whole neighborhood—is like a suburban fever dream. No sidewalks or trash in lawns. No evidence of humans ever trodding the street save for the lone man who jogs past your Uber wearing too-short shorts and a terry cloth sweatband on his forehead. The driver sets your luggage on the sidewalk. “Medo wa ase,” you say. Thank you. The cab driver widens his eyes and shakes a knowing index finger at you. You smile to yourself, satisfied, tipping him ten bucks.
Concrete hexagon slabs create a makeshift path to Paul’s house in lush, envy-green grass that tickles the tips of your toes when you walk. Draperies rattle and small faces emerge in the window pane. Paul opens the door and bounds toward you. His smooth, sand-brown face, the facial stubble, the low fade are all the same—the sparse, sparkly gray hairs around his temples are new. He wears sandals, toes long and hairy, nails trimmed neatly.
“Audrey, I would have picked you up. You didn’t need to get an Uber,” Paul says, inexplicably breathless. He grabs your bags and carries them despite the wheels that make his gesture unnecessary. You follow him, looking at the broad back that fills his gray tee shirt and the familiar hips that cling to his khaki shorts.
As soon as you walk in, two small girls ogle you, making your uterus throb. Their hair fuzzes around the perimeter of their heads, small braids flopping as they move. Chubby faces and stomachs. Bare feet with chipped, soft pink nail polish. Eyelet sundresses. Two sets of perfect, Crayola brown shoulders. It’s too much. You almost turn around and leave, grab hold of the doorknob and make a run for it, send Paul a text from the street saying you’ll pick up your bags later when a striking, tawny woman steps from around the corner in a denim apron. She comes and places loving hands on the tops of each girls’ heads.
Lila.
She’s gained a few pounds—maybe exactly three pounds, like she went from a loose size six to a fitting-just-right size six—and her hair is longer, swept up in something messy-chic. The shorter of the two girls pulls my pashmina, raises her dress, shows off her innie belly button.
“Parker, pull your shirt down. Don’t be so unsophisticated,” the other girl says, exasperated. She comes over and grabs her little sister’s hand, which she refuses to take and instead slides to the floor with her arms folded.
Paul smiles. He raises his right hand, flattening his palm against the air like a stop sign. “Okay, Ms. Audrey is our dinner guest. We talked about this, right? Being on our best behavior?” Paul talks with gentle authority.
“We can never go out to eat,” Lila says.
“Not unless we want an ulcer.” Paul raises his eyebrows and places a hand on the older girl’s shoulder. This here is Carrington and over there is Parker, who’s almost three, and kind of a terrorist.”
Parker nods proudly.
“They’re absolutely beautiful. Paul, I had no idea,” you say, which is a lie. You’ve seen pictures of the girls on Facebook.
Paul points a finger at Lila. “She’s the miracle worker. I just live here. Anyway, come in, come in. We didn’t mean to trap you at the front door. Can I get you some wine or a beer?” Paul leads you further into the house, around the corner to a small eat-in kitchen. You sit at a simple wooden table. Lila stirs something steaming in a pot while Parker hovers by her leg, leaning on her flesh, sucking her thumb.
“Do you want some mama’s milk? Hmm?” Lila says to her, setting a wooden spoon on the rest. She takes off her apron, neatly hanging it on a nearby wall hook then lifts the little girl under her armpits and places her on her thin hip. They walk over to the table and sit across from you.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asks me, but it’s not an actual question because she’s already raised her brown tunic enough to expose her breast. Parker climbs up and lies on her mother’s lap, pulling her mother’s dark nipple into her mouth. You stare at the woman’s naked breast. Your uterus aches. You’re not going to make it through this dinner. Your whole body tightens like bolts.
Paul says, “I’m sorry, beer or wine?”
You shake your head, barely able to stop staring at Lila’s body and the way she strokes the girl’s hair and rubs crusts from the corners of her eyes with her thumbs.
“Beer, thanks,” you say.
You want to leave. The clock on the microwave says six thirty-seven. Your stomach growls, so you don’t move from your seat. Eventually food will appear on your plate, you will eat it, you will be full.
Parker squeezes and releases Lila’s breast with one hand and reaches inside her shirt to twiddle the other. Unfazed, Lila chats with the girl, holding her under the curl of her knees. Paul hands you a Corona with a wedge of lime, and you drain it in a few glugs.
When Parker finishes drinking, Lila slides her tunic back into place and rejoins the steaming pot as if she isn’t a human wet bar.
You are slowly dying here. You need a leveling-up. “Remind me, Lila. What was your major back at Howard?” you say.
She looks surprised that you asked. “Um, English, like Paul.”
You nod. You think about not following that up, but . . . then . . . , “What are you doing now?”
Lila pauses, looks at you confused.
Paul jumps in before she has a chance to answer the question. “Oh, she’s got enough to do around here with these folks,” he says.
She clears her throat. “I was thinking about going back to school, you know to get an MFA but then we had Parker, so I figured I’d just wait for her to go to kindergarten,” she says, her voice tapering off like an amputation. She stirs in the pots a little faster than before.
Women like Lila irk you. I mean, what the hell does she do with that expensive Howard University education? You almost convince yourself that Lila’s lost potential is what’s bothering you right now.
Almost.
You swish the dregs of golden beer around in the bottle. “I didn’t mean to say that being home isn’t work. That must have sounded like a judgement.”
For a brief few seconds, being a bitch makes you feel better.
“Some might call it the original work,” Paul says, giving Lila a nod. “Anyway, little Parker came as quite a surprise. In fact, for months while Lila was still carrying her we called her Shock and Awe.”
Lila offers an unhappy grin and turns her attention back to the pot and stirs, silent and barely there like hair wisps.
“The girls are great together. Look at them. Look at me. Did you ever think I’d be saddled with kids?” Paul says, chuckling, filling his mouth with beer. The girls color on a chalkboard wall near the back door.
“No,” you say, thinking of the baby you all might have had together twelve years ago.
“What about you, Audrey? Do you have any children?” Lila says, pulling a stack of plates from the cupboard adjacent to the stove. Paul goes to help her carry the dishes to the table.
You’re caught off guard. Did it look like you had children? If you had children, why wouldn’t you have brought them to dinner with you? You take in a huge breath and let it out, make a thick noise. “Nope. No children,” you say. Your empty uterus tugs you right beneath your navel. Under the table you rub the spot in the shape of a full-moon, over and over again.
“She wouldn’t have the time. Two books in three years. Jesus. When do you sleep?” Paul says, taking another gulp of beer and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “No, Audrey is all about career, which is smart. Look, as great as these girls are, they slow down your work. I’d be so much further along—” Paul says, pausing. “Anyway. We all make choices, right?”
Lila slaps forks on each jute placemat, her mouth pinched. She cuts her eye at Paul.
He raises his eyebrows. “Aw, babe, don’t get mad.”
“I’m not,” Lila says, under her breath.
“Don’t get me wrong, I would do it all over again,” Paul says to you and Lila, trying too hard to sound convincing. “In a second.” He punctuates his last words with a pathetic nod. It’s brutal to watch.
“Can I have another?” You shake your empty bottle in Paul’s direction. The soggy lime wedge in the bottom of the bottle is drunk and happy. You want to feel that same way.
“Sure!” Paul stumbles to the fridge and grabs another Corona. You drink this one faster than the first, sit patiently for your brain to swirl like someone’s stirred it with a finger.
Lila slams hot dishes on the table— curried chicken, rice, roasted Brussel sprouts, tossed salad dressed with a clear, shiny dressing. The whole display announces two things. One, Lila’s kicking ass at this woman thing. And two, she’s pissed as hell. You don’t blame her.
“I’ll be right back,” she says. Lila pulls the marbleized pin out her hair, letting her thick relaxed hair fall past her shoulders. She musses it with one hand before leaving the kitchen with her bare feet and black toe nail polish.
Paul scoops food onto the girls’ plates.
“Why is it yellow?” Carrington asks.
“Because it’s curry. Mommy worked hard on it, so give it a try.”
“I no like yewoe chicken,” Parker says, stuffing her thumb in her mouth.
“See what you’re missing?” Paul says to you, gesturing his head towards the two girls.
Your body groans. “Shouldn’t you check on Lila?” you ask.
“Nah, she’s okay,” he says— licking his bottom lip, giving you those eyes that used to look down at you when you two would fuck. “Ca va? Je pense à toi tout le temps,” Paul says. So how are you really? I think about you all the time. Or something like that. This takes you by surprise. This is the thing you did back at Howard when you wanted to talk dirty out in the open when everyone else sat in dumb ignorance.
“Is that French, Daddy?”
He nods in Carrington’s direction. She wrinkles her nose like something stinks. She isn’t wrong. Paul’s tone is intimate, a betrayal.
“I’m fine,” you say. “Where’s the bathroom?” The thought of Paul naked makes you sick. You have to leave this house, breathe some fresh air. You wonder what Khalil is doing right now. You miss the tickly fur of his beard. You miss resting your hand on his forearm when you face one another in bed.
“Around the corner. You want Carrington to show you?”
“No,” you say. “I can find it.”
You struggle to catch your breath. You look at the little girls with brown hands that dimple at each knuckle, who eat the rice and ignore the chicken. You push yourself from the table and gather your purse and head to the front door, but before you make it, you pass the powder room. Lila has opened the door, sobbing, wiping her eyes. You glare at one another. Her eyes are red and puffy, and her nose oozes snot. And you want to slap that pretty face. She doesn’t get to cry about anything. Her body hasn’t failed. She and Paul have babies that live, that hold on, that don’t slip away like excrement. She isn’t left with an undiagnosed-able, unfixable syndrome that makes carrying babies to term impossible.
“Wait, Audrey, where are you going?” Lila’s voice catches.
That is the problem. How many footsteps would it take to make it back to Chicago tonight? You run, but you’realways there whenever you think you’ve arrived. “I don’t know,” you say. “I’m not sure, but thanks for making dinner. It looks really delicious. Tell Paul I’ll see him on campus.”
Lila walks over and puts her arms around you. She reeks of curry and sandalwood. She must be able to smell the sick-sweet drops of your brokenness seeping through your linen shirt, be close enough to tell that babies pass through you like a sieve. You bristle, but she doesn’t let go—she squeezes tighter and kisses your cheek twice. You take her in your arms and hold her, feeling the thumping rhythm of two hearts beating.
Gail Upchurch is a writer of young adult and adult fiction. She is a 2022 Kimbilio Fellow, a 2021 Tin House YA Scholar, a 2021 Community of Writers Scholar, a finalist for the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize, and winner of the 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Prose Open Prize. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University’s Program for Writers, an MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction from Chicago State University, and a BA in English from Howard University. Gail has recent short stories published or forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Obsidian: Journal & Ideas in the African Diaspora, Tupelo Quarterly, and Taint Taint Taint Magazine, and is currently at work on two young adult novels, and a linked collection of short stories for an adult audience. When she’s not making up stories, she teaches composition at a small community college in Maryland and is an assistant nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press.
