So We Can Glow - Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith Page 0,63
DON’T TELL ANYONE. THIS IS FOR ONLY US. TAKE THE TICKET. COME TO LOS ANGELES. I WILL PICK YOU UP @ LAX. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.
* * *
Our baby was Bougainvillea. I hadn’t named her; she’d named herself. She’d told me her name in a psychedelic purple vision-dream the night before I bled and lost her. Six months afterward, I told Marco I wanted to have an affair. I didn’t tell him this on purpose to hurt him. I was in a fugue state. Looking at Marco’s face meant looking into the face of the baby girl we had to bury. I didn’t want to look at Marco’s face anymore, but I couldn’t look away. I’d loved Marco’s face since I was a little girl. We met in elementary school. Marco Hernandez. Kendall Huff. He always sat right in front of me. I looked at the back of his head for twelve years before we were a couple.
Bougainvillea, Bungalow meant the place Marco had rented for us in California. It took me about four hours to fly there alone. I kept my promise and didn’t tell anyone. That part wasn’t hard. When our baby Bougainvillea died, I stopped talking to people as much. I didn’t have anything to say. And the way I’d previously withstood small talk although I hated it with the fire of a trillion suns? That went away too, a relief. I didn’t have to pretend anymore. I allowed myself to be as selfish as I wanted to be, and Marco did too. Our baby was born dead. We deserved quiet. We’d earned it. Marco and I would be in our house together, our home, and sometimes we wouldn’t say a word to one another. We lived like this for months. But sometimes, we talked about B and that’s what we started calling her anyway. B. Bee. It made it easier because we could imagine she wasn’t a real human we could lose. Not then, not ever. She was something else completely. A bee.
Marco told me I didn’t want to have an affair, I just wanted to feel better. We were sad together all the time, trapped in the same smothering grief coat. I asked Marco if he wanted to have an affair and he said yes and no. He said he wanted to have an affair with me. He said we could pretend to be other people because it was what people did when they experienced trauma. He told me we’d experienced trauma. And I hated assigning that word to myself, even though it was true. Trauma sounded a whole lot like something you couldn’t come back from. Like terminal and eternity.
I apologized to Marco for saying I wanted to have an affair. It wasn’t what I meant. I’d never been with anyone else and I didn’t want to be. I just wanted to feel better. I wanted to go back to a place and time where I wasn’t a mother without a baby, an oyster shell with no pearl. A place and time before I hadn’t been able to hold on to our Bee. A honeycomb with no honey. Marco got deliriously angry whenever I blamed myself for losing her. One night I was crying and wouldn’t stop saying it. That was the night I said I wanted to have an affair. The following day, Marco sent me the invitation. Bougainvillea, Bungalow. And I flew to California to meet M.
* * *
He’d texted me and asked me to wear a dress. I’d gotten a dove-gray dress and put it over black leggings. I was wearing some strappy gold sandals and a medium-sized pair of gold hoop earrings. The dress was comfortable, not sexy. I started crying about it as soon as I got into the deeply air-conditioned rental car Marco was sitting in. He was quiet and drove away from the airport until he could pull aside safely. He turned the car off and looked at me.
“I’m sorry my dress is so plain.”
“You look beautiful. And everything is different out here. We can be whoever we want to be out here. We don’t have to grieve here, Kendall. We have a weekend. One weekend a month when we can pretend.” He held up his finger.
His clothes were new and my blood flashed thinking of him going shopping alone, picking out something just for me, just for the weekend. It wasn’t something Marco would usually do, but this wasn’t Marco, this was M.
“You look