The double wide trailer, which had felt like a luxury when she first moved in, stretched uselessly long, incapable of retaining heat. It wasn’t just the big empty crawlspace under the trailer and the metal roof atop it keeping it cold—it was the walls, papery and wobbling in the pine tree shadows. The same qualities that made the space so useless in winter also made it unbearable in summer: heat baked in through the hot-plate roof, and cooled air leaking through gaps around the windows. The new mother thought of that now, how just a few months prior it had been summer, and she lay sticky and pregnant on the laminate floor, her baby cooking inside her like a dragon’s egg over coals. The misery of those months tugged vaguely at her mind, but mostly the memory was something she longed to return to. What a stupid thing it seemed to her now, to complain about the heat.
The baby was kept miles down the mountain on the other side of town. His grandmother had insisted she take him, as she had a clean, warm apartment and the young couple had an empty box they couldn’t keep warm. As a parting gift, she gave her son’s girlfriend half a bottle of old Percocet and an extra bundle of postpartum underwear she’d swiped on the way out of the hospital. The new mother swallowed three pills and sank into the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s car. The boyfriend sheepishly asked his mom for gas money and drove off before she’d finished buckling the baby into its car seat.
That had been last week, or the week before—the new mother wasn’t sure. She came home and slept, but fitfully, as her bizarre dreams prevented her from getting any true rest. There was the one where she was roasted on a spit until her skin popped off like crackling, revealing a new layer underneath, gleaming like pale butter. There was the one where she ran on her high school track until she realized her right ear was missing. Then her left forearm. Then her breasts. Then, finally, her legs—sending her headfirst into the asphalt. Upon impact, she woke. In her calmest dreams, she sat alone in the various rooms of her childhood while some ill defined entity lurked in the background: a shadow in the shape of a dog’s mouth, a chasm growing slowly underneath.
Every few hours, urged by pain, she made her way to the kitchen, where she pulled up two sweatshirts and down three tank tops, letting loose her milk-heavy breasts over the sink. She rolled her fingers over them, easing the milk out and into the drain. The unbelievable freeze this brought had her expecting the milk to turn to ice the second it hit the air, but instead, the light yellow liquid pooled, then slipped away.
By feigned coincidence, her boyfriend would rise and move around the house at the same time as the milk-letting. Foraging in the fridge for something that still wasn’t there, he stole quick, frustrated glances at the tits he hadn’t touched in months. The mother kept her eyes on the drain and her spine very still, working as mechanically as possible. She could not not release the milk—the pain was too great, and it would leak anyway, soaking her clothes and freezing her further. She could, however, release it in better and worse ways.
She had started the practice in the kitchen sink because it was where she stood the first time her baby was gone and her breasts overflowed. It hadn’t seemed to her that it would matter. But he had walked in, hungry, desperate, and at the sight of them, instinctively stood behind her while she moved the liquid free. The rebuff was automatic, obvious. It was like touching a hot stove or stepping on a nail. Immediately she pulled her pelvis into the counter and yelped, and immediately he retreated to what had become his bedroom.
The next time, she walked through the master bedroom to reach the only bathroom with a working sink, passing in front of the TV and through his line of sight. This was worse—his sighs and throat-clearing snaking their way under the locked door. She realized too late, her accidental taunt. The door acted like a muleta, urging the bull to charge. He glared at her as she walked out, and for the following hours, the house smelled of cigarettes put out on the carpet.
From the third time on, she kept to the kitchen. And each time, day and night, he came in when she did. From the corners of the room, he watched in choppy, heavy-browed glances, his want twitching in his jeans, his fists curled around whatever blunt, beer can, or pork chop he could find.
So she worked her new motherhood out of her as quickly and efficiently as possible, her full, pale flesh freezing in the trailer air, her nipples traitorous beacons calling home what she no longer wanted.
In the time between emptying, the baby’s mother curled atop the spare mattress in the baby’s would-be room. The couple had bought two mattresses from a motel’s going-out-of-business sale—a king for the master bedroom, a full for the spare. They’d been able to afford a bed frame too, but only one, so the second mattress was on the floor, closer to the cold earth. She stared across the room at the pack-and-play that sat waiting for its future occupant. She stared at the blank walls, thinking it was strange that in the two years she lived with her boyfriend, they’d never thought to cover them in art or photos.
That the baby had been taken was an exaggeration. The baby had been invited to the very small and very warm apartment where his father’s mother lived. There was room for only one, the grandma said, and it was understood that when the weather warmed, he could come home. And yet, the new mother had to walk her mind back from the edge, as every few minutes an alarm sounded: “Someone has stolen the baby!” But it had been herself, just a few weeks before, who had handed over the tiny pink creature.
She tried to remember meeting her boyfriend but couldn’t place an exact date or location. It was just that she had been living—everywhere, nowhere—a cousin’s spare room, a rented RV, friends’ sofas, backseats, until eventually one night at his trailer turned into three hundred, and then she woke up tender-breasted and puking. The pregnancy, too, was unmemorable. It had happened to all the women in her life without ritual or fanfare. A stomach grew, a baby came out, the baby was kept alive until it left the house sixteen years later. “Motherhood” as a concept had never occurred to her until the nurse, backlit by the hospital lights and smiling with surprising warmth, had welcomed her to it.
She knew that on the other side of the trailer, the baby’s father rocked on a curved C-shaped chair, his knees bent and pointed toward the ceiling, his crotch aimed at the TV that alternated between displaying a game (video) or the game (sport). He sat in a cloud of stale smoke and dust, his eyes perpetually red and watering. Before the pregnancy, when she was just the girlfriend, she’d sit between his legs, holding her own controller, as stoned or buzzed as he, and played whatever he played until she felt his demand in the center of her back. It had been easy and enjoyable then to turn around and climb on top or to bend forward and arch. They were at that age when this was all they wanted, and adrift enough to believe it was all they needed. Money came occasionally, just enough to keep the internet paid and the high going. They were not like her parents had been—addicted and raging. They were softened, calmed, and easily slipped into sobriety when there was an opening at the lumber yard or available shift as a home health aide. They worked to cover the previous month’s expenses and relaxed enough to justify the work. They were in love, if, like them, you believed love was the absence of resistance.
The sound was unfamiliar and reached her in a half-waking state, so at first, she felt comforted by the shh, shh, shh outside the window. Her mother might have made a sound like that once. But no, her mother wasn’t around anymore and this shushing meant something else. She woke completely realizing what it was, and afraid of what the snowfall meant. She hurried to her boyfriend’s room, slamming into his gaze at the doorway.
“We have to go get the baby. It’s snowing.”
“If it’s already snowing, we can’t get him.”
“It’s just started. If we don’t go now, who knows how long it’ll be until we see him.”
“We visited yesterday. He’s fine.”
She was stunned by this. Their last visit had been yesterday? That soon? That long ago? Her longing was so acute, it seemed irrational that she could need someone so desperately after such a short period of time away—and for someone she’d really only just met.
His eyes were off her now, his jaw set in that way that told her asking alone wouldn’t be enough. She dropped to her knees.
“I really need this. If I had this, I think I could relax again. I haven’t felt relaxed in so long…”
He knew this was true. She had tensed up sometime during pregnancy. And while she hadn’t receded from the bed first, it was her whole atmosphere that drove him away in the early months. He knew it wasn’t the two of them anymore, so sex became perverse, and he hated it—taking too long to come, nearly failing to, something that had never happened before. She seemed more eager, sloppy somehow, selfish. She looked like she could finish without him—like, at her peak, he wasn’t there at all. Eventually, he told her he couldn’t take it; they’d fuck after the baby was born. She could still help him, of course, make her mouth make things better, but then she grew fat and spiteful, and they retreated to opposite sides of the trailer. When her body was finally rid of the baby, they still didn’t return to each other, even in looks, even in attitude. Even in their recent alone time together, she gave nothing. He’d been tricked completely. The fundamental agreement, the basis of their pairing, completely thrown out, denied, destroyed. And he had no say in it; she just did whatever she wanted.
And now she was so clearly trying to use his body against him, manipulating it to get what she wanted. She wrapped her hand around him and worked, his left hand steadying himself on the ground, his right still clutching the PlayStation controller. It was over so fast he had time to think of nothing at all, and she had flown off before even his legs slackened.
“I’ll wait in the car,” she told him.
The car was low to the ground, small, fifteen years old. She sat in the passenger seat, turned it on. While her boyfriend had gotten his license at fifteen, she had yet to. There was always a man or best friend available to drive her. There were her own legs, capable of carrying her so far. The desire to learn sprouted around the second month of pregnancy. Whatever friends had been around before were around much less, pregnancy being the least fun thing they could think of. She only had her boyfriend and his mother to help her get around and for the first time, she felt constrained. Being alone started to look less like isolation and more like rest. But she realized all this too late. At least for the length of her pregnancy, the boyfriend wouldn’t teach her. His mother explained, “You can’t risk learning now. What if you crashed with my grandbaby?”
It wasn’t out of gratitude he zipped up his pants and walked out the front door toward the car. There was failure in her plan—they wouldn’t get off the mountain in this weather. The car wasn’t built for it and the dirt roads were unforgiving. In this town when snow came, everything shut down—schools, roads, stores. It usually melted after a few days, so there wasn’t any panic. There was nothing to do but wait. But if she wanted to waste their time, then he’d let her. He cradled that pleasure in his belly—how good it was going to feel when she didn’t get what she wanted.
Their trailer was at the bottom of a hill at the top of a mountain. When it rained, a moat of water pooled at the cinder blocks it sat atop. When it snowed, the steep driveway you needed to climb to get up the hill became slick as a metal playground slide. But on this day, the snow had only just started, and though the car struggled and swerved slightly, it climbed the half-mile drive onto the main gravel road. Six miles down the gravel road, they’d turn off onto a paved one. After another ten miles, they’d find themselves in a town of 2,000 where their baby was living.
A few minutes onto the gravel road, the wind picked up dramatically, blasting the windshield with cloudy white debris. The girlfriend looked ahead, teeth grinding, the bouncing of the car jarring her still aching cervix. The boyfriend, ignorant of her physical experience and delightfully angry at their situation, drove faster than he reasonably should and darted toward the dips he knew were in the road, though he could not see them. No other cars were out, and he moved from side to side and straight down the middle. Had there been lines in the road, he’d have crossed over them all.
Going downhill was, in a way, easier than going up. The snow accumulated fast, making it dangerous but not exactly difficult. Gravity would have brought them down without help from the boyfriend, who casually lifted his foot from the brake, allowing them to race down before he eased back, catching them just before control was lost. In the side windows, cedars, pines, and sycamores suggested themselves through the gray blur. If the car veered off the road and over the cliff to the left, they’d land in the James River. If it veered to the right, they’d slam into a tangle of trees, grown up close to each other, fighting over nutrients in the soil.
The car was a few miles from the main paved road when it did the latter, so quickly even the boyfriend was surprised. The car cleared a small embankment before slamming into four young sycamores, each snapping with the force of it. The airbags slammed the couple across their faces and chests. Had either worn glasses, the lenses would have shattered. The hood of the car popped back and up, twisting toward the sky. Smoke almost immediately bled out from the engine.
The boyfriend’s instinct was to stay still. For a long time, no thought crossed his mind, and then the only thought was: someone will come to fix this. Eventually, he thought to turn his head, a feat that made him groan in pain, his neck having stiffened to the left. Beside him, there was no woman, and her absence snapped him into something like concern. With trepidation, he looked toward the windshield to see if he’d find a girlfriend-sized hole through the glass, but the windshield, spiderweb-cracked, was still in place and covered completely in a thick layer of white. The snow looked so cold, and the man realized he himself was freezing, having only worn sweatpants and a hoodie, with no intention of leaving the toasty car.
She had left him. She had abandoned him. He knew for certain it was not to get him help, and this betrayal, worse even than the pregnancy (which, he could admit, hadn’t been entirely her fault), worse than her rejection, her manipulation, even her demand that they risk their safety—hit him like a revelation. But this betrayal also erased the pain in his neck, chest, abdomen, and legs. He undid his seatbelt and moved with relative ease outside of the car, which by now had bloomed a modest fire in its engine.
Had he grown up hunting like his older brothers, he might have thought to look for tracks still detectable in the snow. But his father had left by the time he was old enough to begin, so it was by accident more than skill that he went the same direction she had chosen, back toward the trailer.
Her head had slammed into the airbag, and the understanding of what she needed to do slammed into her awareness just as abruptly. With her eyes shut against the pain radiating from her head to her core to her calves, she stumbled out of and away from the car.
They owned an electric space heater. Why hadn’t all three of them—father, mother, and baby—moved into one room with the space heater? They could tack a blanket over the window and put towels in front of the doors, like her mother had done growing up. She opened her eyes and knew she wasn’t far from the trailer. She began to walk.
Aren’t babies kept warm by their mother’s bodies? Wouldn’t he be fine under her shirt, bundled up? How did babies in Alaska survive? Russia? New England? They were in Missouri! It was just a cold snap. The ice would be gone in a few afternoons. The cold in a few weeks. Why was it his mother to take the baby? Her mother was dead, her father drunk, but hadn’t her brother said she could call? Hadn’t he offered months ago? The snow continued to fall, but she knew where she was, her legs moving steadily over the rocky terrain.
At the trailer, she puts clean clothes in a duffle bag, gathers the baby items she forgot she was given. She walks to the bathroom and strips off, soaked from milk, sweat, snow, and blood. She finds a bottle of peroxide and pours it over every wound she can find. She does not shiver from the cold nor cry out from pain. Nothing hurts as it should. It’s been how many days without him? Twelve? Twenty three? Shouldn’t her milk have dried up by now? But no! She’d been making herself make more. That’s what the doctor had said: it would stop when her body understood there was no mouth for it. But she had milked herself for him. She knew it now, how discomfort had been an excuse to release the pressure, to invite the pressure back.
In the snow, the boyfriend spots a white cat staring him down from a felled tree. She shouldn’t be in this weather—it’s unnatural to lounge so calmly. He raises his arms and stomps toward it, but it doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t have time for this. He walks ahead a while longer, and when he looks back, she’s gone.
Naked and releasing the milk, she feels her shoulders fall. Her head stretches from side to side. The snow outside reflects a clean, blue light through the small bathroom window. Her eyes trace the silvery lines down the soft, wrinkled bag of her stomach. She admires even the ruddy color where the blood has dried between her legs.
He can’t believe her. He can’t believe the misery of the situation. His sneakers sink deeper into the ground, his body wet from ice and blood. Two years she’s lived with him and she’s given him what? She’s made his life better how?
She shifts her weight to one leg, leans against the counter. She will sleep eventually, she can feel the pull toward it—a true rest with her child beside her. What did the nurses say? Sleep when the baby sleeps?
He doesn’t holler for her when he walks through the side door. He’s too angry to speak. The trailer is like one long hallway. He steps through her room, almost spitting on her empty bed. He moves through the kitchen, living room. But in his bedroom, he stops short and sucks air through his teeth. The bathroom door is open. She sees him in the mirror, and he sees the look across her face—recognition. She remembers him. He understands immediately that she had forgotten all about him until now. He is stunned, blank, breathless, and then he is striding toward her.
She’ll remember it as her mouth on his first, not his on hers. When he goes for her wrists, she’s too fast and goes for the hem of his sweatshirt, the backs of her fingers skimming his frozen torso as she lifts it over his head. On his left side, his flesh is swollen, and she feels him flinch when she grazes the spot. He is shocked by her willingness, angrier for it. He digs his fingers into her back, begins to move her toward the counter. Her entire tongue is in his mouth, and leading with her teeth on his teeth, she moves him backward toward the bed.
He collapses under her. He’s out of breath from the walk, cannot feel the toes in his sneakers or the fingers he’s trying to ground into her flesh. It’s a miracle he’s hard at all. She feels his vengeance and frustration pressing her, housed in the root of his body. He stabs at her, but pain radiates from his side, and he struggles to place himself. He is preparing to flip her, inhaling sharp and tensing for the effort. He knows even wounded, once he has her under him, that’s where she’ll stay. But what he knows, she knows, so with her eyes toward the bare window across the room, she presses her thighs against him and puts him where he wants.
Why wouldn’t her body respond? Outside, the clouds have cracked open, and a rich light beams down over the white-dusted pines. She can imagine it: a future in the spring, out on the grass, a body like the one inside her, but so unlike the one inside her. The experience will be barely recognizable: a pleasure so lush and perfect everything around her will have banded together to give her more and more until she never wants again—never lives unaware of her wanting, which has always been there, she thinks, crying out.
He recognizes pleasure in her, wide-eyed and looking past him to something he isn’t able to see. Despite himself, he shrinks inside her. It’s too much for both of them. She’s raised herself, no longer attempting to keep his arms at his sides. His desire to hurt her is overt now, a fist forming, but her legs press into his sides, and what is bleeding inside of him singes with pain. He buckles, and falls completely outside her. Empty, she comes, deep in the ecstasy of her own making.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment, or log in if you’re already a paid subscriber.