The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson

Author:Leslie J. Anderson [Anderson, Leslie J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

MARSHALL

Marshall pulled into the Foxglove driveway and found Ros waiting for her, Phillip bundled and sitting in his carrier. Getting the car seat into the truck took forever, and she was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to put a baby seat in the front. She had a master’s, for the love of God. Why was it so hard to strap a plastic seat into a car? When they were finally ready, Phillip was crabby and threatening to cry, despite all the soothing noises Ros made.

She was, momentarily, glad she didn’t have children. She and Joseph had talked about it, of course, but somehow the conversation always ended on maybe which really meant no. She imagined, for a moment, the two of them sitting in their messy apartment, dirty dishes in the sink, toys scattered across the floor, Joseph laughing in the middle of the floor as the baby babbled and kicked. The vision was immediately obscured by another: Marshall standing in front of a hospital bed, the machines beeping quietly, the baby sleeping in her arms, because even her nightmare wouldn’t allow her to see Joseph in that bed and their baby crying at the same time. He was gray. She was alone.

She put a hand on her heart. It hadn’t happened. It was okay. It hadn’t happened and she felt relief. She was here because she didn’t have that baby—that almost-baby, that shattered sliver of Joseph that might have burrowed into her heart like a clot.

And then she felt guilty.

Shouldn’t she feel a different kind of grief? A better, purer kind?

“You have everything you need?” Marshall asked.

“Yeah,” Ros said.

“You did your homework?”

“We don’t have homework. It’s a new thing. Kids were getting too stressed.”

For a moment, Marshall considered saying something about kids these days, about their weakness or softness, but she remembered Ros looking up longingly at his family’s ruined house, rotting away in the forest, the curtain fluttering out at them like the veil of some haunted bride, and bit her tongue.

The high school looked like it had been shiny and new in 1960. She knew, without asking, that Agatha and Carter had attended the same school, and that Phillip would likely attend it too. The sign, once painted a bright and cheerful orange, said Whitehorse High School, but the letters were curling into themselves, cracked and faded.

Ros told her to pull around the back, where a slightly newer sign read Linda Grayson Childcare Center.

“Do you need help?”

“Nah,” Ros said, in a tone that told her that, yes, he did.

She got out and took the baby’s bag from the back seat, feeling strangely like Ros’s mother or aunt as they walked up and opened the heavy steel door, smattered with stickers of smiling suns and rain clouds. A bell rang, the identical twin to the one over the door at the diner.

The room was small, segmented by low lines of cubbies with children’s names on them, written in crayon on three-by-five cards. Nothing matched, not the bassinets or the cots or the hooks for coats on the walls.

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