The Push by Ashley Audrain (motivational novels TXT) 📗

You had come home one day and opened your laptop to the house listing on a real estate agent’s website. I didn’t even know you had been looking.

For the next two months the three of us spent every weekend there, breaking things up with tools we borrowed and meeting with tradesmen who did what we couldn’t. We agreed we couldn’t manage a full renovation right now, but there were things that couldn’t wait: new flooring, new bathrooms. The list grew with your keen architect’s eye. The week of the move, your parents came to town to help with Violet while we packed and unpacked. They brought her over to say good-bye to the apartment before we handed back the keys. Ceremony was your mother’s thing, not mine. Somewhere along the way I’d lost the sentimental attachment to the place where our family began. Even you had – I could tell by the relief in your face when we left that building for the last time. The way you dropped the keys into the manila envelope and tossed it onto the doorman’s desk.

Violet stayed with your parents at their hotel downtown while we worked until two in the morning. I moved her old baby stuff, packed in rubber bins, to the second small bedroom upstairs.

‘Shouldn’t those go in the basement?’ you asked.

‘We’ll need them again sooner or later.’

You drew a long breath. ‘Let’s call it a night.’

We slept on our mattress in the middle of the floor of our new bedroom. We hadn’t remembered to turn on the heat and so we bundled up in hoodies and sweatpants underneath the blanket.

‘We’ll be happy here,’ I whispered and rubbed my socked feet over yours.

‘I thought we always were.’

33

She must have seen my naked silhouette in the moonlight. My thin nightshirt draped the intersection of our bodies, my catlike arch, my breasts like tiny sacks of sand swinging over your face.

I moaned low and long, my hands on the headboard, and I blocked out the room around us. The closet didn’t have doors to hide the mess of laundry I hadn’t yet done, and the row of dry cleaning I hadn’t yet unbagged, and the box of clothing donations I hadn’t yet dropped off. I was buried in ‘yets.’ The move was disorganized and the end of the renovations were slow.

Looking back, we were in the midst of the kind of mundane chaos I sometimes yearn for now.

I didn’t hear the creak of the door or the smack of her flat feet along the new hardwood that had been laid the week before. I didn’t know she was there, not until you shoved me off and swore and pulled the sheet over yourself. I lay at the end of the bed in a fetal position, where I had landed at the hand of your panic. Go back to bed. Nothing is wrong, I had told her calmly. She asked what we had been doing. Nothing, I answered. Jesus Christ, Blythe, you said, as though everything about the moment was my fault.

And it was, in a way. I was ovulating. You were tired. I had cried into my pillow. And so you rubbed my back and began kissing my neck, the kind of kisses that said you loved me but didn’t want to fuck me. There would always be another time to try, you said.

You don’t want another baby, I’d accused. Why? We lay together quietly, and later, you ran your fingers through my hair. I do want another baby, you whispered.

You were lying but I didn’t care.

I rolled over and stroked you until I felt you give in. I slipped you inside me and pretended everything was different – you, the room, the motherhood I knew – and begged you not to stop.

Three weeks earlier I had brought up the idea again while we brushed our teeth. You spit in the sink and ripped us each a thread of floss. Let’s see. Later. We’ll see.

There was an uncharacteristic bluntness in your voice that would have triggered my suspicion on a different day. But not then. This wasn’t about you. This was about me. The only way forward I could see for our family was to have a second child. Redemption, maybe, for everything that had gone wrong. I thought back to why we’d had Violet in the first place – you wanted a family and I wanted to make you happy. But I also wanted to prove all of my doubts wrong. I wanted to prove my mother wrong, too.

Blythe, the women in this family, we’re different. You’ll see.

I wanted another chance at motherhood.

I could not concede that I was the problem.

I often pointed to babies while I walked Violet to school. Wouldn’t that be nice? A little brother or sister? She rarely replied to me. She was increasingly in her own world, but by then the distance that grew between us made life together easier, in a way. We saw the same mother at drop-off every morning with her newborn tucked into her chest while she carefully bent over to kiss her older child good-bye.

‘Two looks like a lot of work,’ I once said to her, smiling.

‘Exhausting, but worth it.’ Worth it. There it was again. She bounced and patted his head. ‘He’s such a different baby. It’s a whole different experience with the second.’

Different.

Violet in our bedroom doorway, hands by her sides. She refused to leave until I answered her about what we had been doing. And so I explained. When two people love each other, they like to cuddle in a special way. We were silent, all of us, there in the dark. And then she walked back to her room. We should comfort her, I said to you. We should go make sure she’s okay.

‘Then go,’ you