How to Care for a Human Girl: A Novel

1

JADA

March 2018

Make an observation that defines a problem.

Every experiment begins here, in the first step of the scientific method: a witnessing, the bud of a question opening. When Jada woke one morning at the gray genesis of dawn, she felt the problem in her gut before she registered it in her mind, the body always knowing what the brain, in dreams, forgets.

For a moment, when she opened her eyes, the world was blank, innocent in its emptiness. Then context settled on the day like a layer of dust, and things came into focus in all their flaw and detail, and she made her observations, remembered where and when and who she was. Where: Pittsburgh, her bedroom, her husband beside her. When: eighteen months since her mother’s death. Who: a woman, grief-drenched and unexpectedly pregnant.

Next to her, Blake dozed, mouth hanging open. Here was the problem, bigger even than the pregnancy itself: although she knew he’d celebrate the news, she couldn’t bring herself to share it.

The sun rose, and the hushed world grew dense and strained as though packed into a space too small. She felt a weight on her chest like ghost hands pressing down. One of her own hands went to her abdomen, the other to her heart. So sweet, she thought, and good—the steadfast organ pumping devotedly away. Jada pictured her heart like a plump strawberry ripe in the crate of her chest, and she felt for that diligent fruit the kind of grateful affection she had tried and so far failed to feel for the cluster of cells that had attached itself to her uterine wall.

She had always assumed she would be a mother, had been primed for it ever since her sister, Maddy, was born just before their mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. Jada had become a surrogate parent at twelve, caring for Maddy while her mother underwent surgery and chemo, lost her breasts and her hair, her balance and control of her hands. Two bald girls in the house then, one in a bed and one in a crib, both crying inconsolably: mother and child. Before Maddy’s birth—their mother was forty and not trying—their parents had referred to her as a miracle. But although Jada loved Maddy, she was plagued by an unfair but unshakable vision of her as a kind of inadvertent bringer of death. Her beginning had been the beginning of the end.

Besides, Jada no longer believed in miracles. She believed in data, in the scientific method. She was earning her doctorate in social psychology, researching the mechanics of choice and decision-making in intimate relationships. Whether it was because of this training or her time raising Maddy or some innate flaw in her character that she could not view her own pregnancy as miraculous, Jada could not be sure.

She’d known for three days, and yesterday, she had almost told Blake. At least, she had considered it. Or at least, she had felt a surge of disproportionate, overwhelming tenderness toward him when he opted to use a stepladder rather than the arm of the couch when reaching up to screw a light bulb into a wall sconce. Tears had welled in her eyes. But she’d said nothing then, and she said nothing now, a pressure in her throat, a pounding in her head.

In the silence and the stillness her hands found each other, as they had often since her mother’s death—a childish habit, holding her own hand. She crossed them at the wrists and interlocked her fingers, and somehow it worked, even now; she felt calm, held. She should hold her husband’s hand. She should reach for him. Instead she drew into herself, rubbing her finger with her thumb, insisting, It’s going to be okay.

Then came the sudden, blaring hysteria of the neighbor’s car alarm. Jada let go of her hand quickly, like she’d been caught by a watchful chaperone. Blake’s alarm clock joined the chorus, a series of chimes and angry vibrations from his phone across the room, and he groaned, hauled his legs over the side of the bed, and stood. An impersonal morning boner tented his boxers. Jada closed her eyes and let one hand return to the spot over her heart.

The din of the day picked up around her: the whine of an ambulance siren, the squawk of a blue jay. Sunlight hardened into stripes like bars that crossed her blanketed body, locking her in a silvery cell. Her skin felt sore. But she rose from her bed, she smoothed the imprint of her body from the still-warm sheets. There was a day to be got through, a problem to be puzzled over. There were choices to be made.

She spent the day on the couch, laptop warming her thighs, a jasmine-scented candle burning beside her. She was working on the protocol for her latest experiment, a study of choice overload and reversibility on undergraduate daters, and she lost herself in the work until Blake got home—at which point, to her horror, she observed herself hiding from him in the hall closet.

It was an involuntary physical reaction that did not occur to her as problematic until she was settled, ankles crossed, arms wrapped around her legs. She was still in her pajamas when she heard the garage door yawn open and Blake’s BMW pull inside, and at first she told herself the pajamas explained her sprint to the closet, as if she intended to doll up for his arrival like some fifties housewife. But the closet she fled to did not contain her clothes, and besides, she had observed this much in her going-on-two years of marriage: in the dream scenes that flashed before your eyes as you zipped your wedding dress and fixed the clasps on your heels, you pictured yourself always that clean and well-clothed, an advertisement for happiness and good hygiene. But this vision was a delusion; marriage was mostly pajamas.

Anyway: he killed the engine; she bolted. Shut the door behind her and sat down beside the vacuum cleaner, where she remained as he wandered through the house, calling her name. He still didn’t know about the pregnancy. He didn’t know, either, how sometimes Jada took out a letter her mother had sent her years ago, placed a clean sheet of paper over the page, and slowly copied the handwriting, one loop at a time. Or listened to old voicemails from her mother on repeat, even the three-minute butt dial that consisted of nothing but the garbled TV noise of The Ellen DeGeneres Show punctuated with her mother’s occasional laughter.

What he did know, what they both knew, was that her desire was dead. When he reached for her, she rolled away. When he touched her, she flinched, floundered, too slippy to be held. The sex that had led to conception had been a chore, and now, with her legs crossed beneath her on the closet floor, Jada was forced to recognize this fact more directly than she had before. Make an observation that defines a problem: here she was; she was here. Now came the question: Why?

She’d left the candle burning in the living room and could smell the jasmine scent wafting through the crack under the closet door. Except for the vacuum and some winter coats, a few cleaning supplies, and the ukulele Blake had bought on a whim once in Maui and never played, the closet where she hid was empty. She and Blake had moved into the house shortly before they married—she’d owned almost nothing at the time—and it was bigger than they needed. He’d tried fireman-carrying her over the threshold but in the process had knocked the tender bone on the outside of her ankle against the doorframe, and this knocking now seemed like a symbol of something, some fundamental way in which she did not fit here on Fifth Avenue, in the too-fancy house he’d bought. She had cried out in pain, My lateral malleolus! and he’d dropped her, his chivalry spoiled. They were the first to live in the house, and its virginal purity—walls without scratches, pristine hardwoods—both delighted and unnerved her, satisfying her clean-freak tendencies but striking her, at the same time, as unmaintainable, unreal.

After ten minutes, Blake blew out the candle. Jada smelled the faint slither of smoke through the closet crack. She heard him ask the cat where she was, heard the cat meow apathetically, heard her phone ring from the spot on a shelf where she’d left it. He was calling her.

He padded past the closet, pausing outside it on his way down the hall, so close Jada could hear her phone ringing both in the living room and from the device held to his ear. Why was he letting it ring? Clearly her phone was home, and as far as he was concerned, she was not. Then the ringing stopped and the floor creaked, Blake shifting his weight from foot to foot, and she wondered if he could sense her presence. Equal to her fear of being caught was her fear of not being so; his finding her might indicate that they were connected by something, some invisible force capable of permeating doors, some connubial sonar in him that pinged in her proximity. She sat unbreathing in hope and fear until he moved back down the hallway, flopped onto the couch, and turned on the TV.

Even as her shame swelled—what kind of wife was she?—it occurred to Jada that there might be some strategic advantage to her position in the closet, that from its confines she might observe her way toward a better understanding of the man on the other side of the door. Fly on the wall, wife in the closet: same difference. She knew people changed their behavior when they knew they were being observed. She recalled the research, the psychologists concealing themselves in bathroom stalls or standing by soap dispensers in plain sight, counting the number of toilet users who washed their hands. The verdict was that most everyone washes—when they know they’re being watched.

What was the handwashing equivalent that Blake might let slide outside of her presence? Entertaining this question was a useful way of avoiding a larger, tougher one—the question of why she was in the closet at all—and Jada gave herself over to it eagerly. She was entitled to this information, she assured herself; in marrying her, Blake had agreed that his intimacy with her would grow over time to heights neither of them could fathom at the moment they exchanged rings. Marriage: the quintessence of informed consent.

But she learned little, only things she already knew. He liked to recite frequently aired commercials alongside their narrators. He liked to talk to the cat, trilling the occasional syllable in an imitation purr. In the beginning his dorky humor and the confidence with which he dispatched it had been part of what drew Jada to him. (I’ll have the leg of salmon, he’d said to the white-vested server at their first fancy dinner out, and winked at her as the server fumbled, confused. The pay’s great, he’d tell someone at a party, describing his job as an anesthesiologist, but the work is mind-numbing.) His jolliness took the pressure off her, allowed her to fade into the background, smiling and nodding, thinking and analyzing. She had always been the serious girl, the studious girl, and she had grown into a serious and studious woman, stressed out, living on a shoestring budget when she met Blake through a dating app, setting up her studies, wrangling research assistants, writing articles, driving home on weekends to visit her sick mother. How hungrily she’d gravitated toward the ease with which Blake glided through the world, opening his wallet, telling his jokes. She had wanted a slice of that ease for herself. She had wanted other things, too, back then.

For instance: frequent and athletic sex of the kind that, lately, had come to feel physically impossible to her. For instance: to be someone else. For instance: to truly believe, as he did, that things were generally okay and would remain okay no matter what happened, who lived or died, who was or wasn’t president. To be cared for, cooked for; to be handed mixed drinks if he was home when she came back from class or a long day of writing; to arrive at his condo and find him chopping a bell pepper or crushing cloves of garlic under the blade of a knife. He worked with a group that administered office-based anesthesia for pain management and worked set hours, and he drew sharp boundaries between his work life and home life in a way Jada respected but couldn’t bring herself to replicate. She could cook, as well—she’d fed herself through college, forgoing expensive meal plans; she’d fed Maddy when her mother was too shaky with neuropathy to hold a spoon—but it excited her to have the option not to. She could mix her own drinks but found herself glad to outsource the work. Gradually she began to understand how much of what she’d done throughout her childhood and adult life she had done not because she’d wanted to, but because she’d had to. Until she met him, she had not had the luxury of telling the difference.

At first it excited her that she and Blake had little in common. He’d never known debt or poverty; his parents had paid for his college and med school, bought him a condo in Philadelphia while he was at Penn Medicine, a house in Durham during his residency at Duke. Nothing terrible had ever happened to him, and he lived relatively free of any fear that it would. Yes, she’d read the research on heterogamy and homogamy, she had plumbed the meta-analyses, she had learned that while most of us claim to want a partner with opposite traits, in fact much of our attraction and relationship satisfaction is rooted in similarity. But you can know what the hot dog’s made of and eat it anyway. You can know something is true and still think it won’t be true for you. Rational choice theory has long been debunked; we are not rational choosers but creatures of want and whimsy.

Blake shut off the TV, and Jada heard him open the fridge, exclaim, What! No milk? and backtrack down the stairs, into the garage and into his car, rewinding his presence, and she scurried to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and prepared the lie she told herself was not one: she’d been for a run. (She had, yesterday. It was not untrue.)

He was a good man. He would be a good father. But as Jada stood with the water weeping down and scrubbed her skin raw, she understood with a clarity that was uncharacteristic of her that she would not have this child.

2

MADDY

April 2018

Obviously, he said, you can’t have it. I hope that’s clear.

They’d met at the grocery store, having agreed that she shouldn’t come over anymore. He carried a shopping basket containing a bag of baby spinach, a package of ground chuck, a family of onions—two large, two small—and a bottle of maple syrup. She pushed an empty cart with a squeaky wheel.

Obviously, Maddy said, pasting a smile on her face as a shopper passed by, a woman in a shirt that read THE ONLY THING TOUGHER THAN A TRUCKER IS A TRUCKER’S MOM! Maddy was smart enough to understand the terms of their conversation without his having to lay them out for her: it was not a conversation at all, but a transaction, here in the canned goods aisle, and it should appear cheerfully formal. She had explained the situation to him over the phone—the test stick she’d peed on, its bold pink lines. It’s out of the question, he’d said, no matter how I feel about you.

She’d been distraught on the phone, crying and shouting, but by the end of the call the force of her emotions had worn her out, and she was ready to behave. Promise me you’ll do the right thing, he’d said, and she’d promised: I will. She’d agreed to meet him at Giant Eagle after she was done cleaning houses so that he could do what he did now: hand her a manila envelope, stuffed thick, nodding like, Go on, take it, be a good girl. So she took it, like a good girl, and placed it in her buggy’s collapsible compartment, the place where children rode.

What could she expect? That he’d want her to have it, keep it? She didn’t even know if she wanted it, and he wasn’t even her boyfriend, just—she flushed at the word—her lover. She didn’t know what else to call him. He didn’t love her.

Her eyes needed somewhere to go, so she focused on a row of baked beans. She thought, for some reason, of her sister. What would Jada do? Not be in this situation, for starters. And if she was, she’d know exactly what to do, and she’d do it. Take charge. Call the shots, like she always did.

Maddy, he said, and she realized her eyes had filled with tears. She kept her gaze on the beans, now blurry, and stood still. You’re going to be okay.

Anger welled inside her. Anger that he’d put her in this position. Anger that he expected her to do what he wanted automatically, without asking questions, moving her arms like a marionette, taking his money. Maddy felt a spark of determination not to give him what he wanted. She could not tell where this determination ended and her true desire began.

That’s just a thing people say to make themselves feel better, she snapped.

He shook his head. You’re stronger than you think you are.

You could knock me over with your pinkie finger.

That’s not true. He shifted his basket from left hand to right, looked around to make sure no one was listening. Said softly, You’re one of the strongest people I know.

Always, even now, the anger she felt toward him was followed by a swelling shame that built, broke, and washed the rage away. She could whine he, he, he all day, but she had done this, too. She, Madelyn Jean Battle. She hadn’t said no. Much worse, she’d said yes, ardently and often. It was her own desire, her own decision, that had led her here.

She glanced at him—he who had been so seasoned and so tender compared to boys she’d been with before, and who now stood framed by mustard bottles lined up in rows, buy-one-get-one tags flapping at their bases—and thought she saw pain in his eyes. At least some of what she’d believed he’d felt for her had to have been real. Didn’t it? A bolt of hope, followed by a rumble of fear: he was as strong and solid as ever, and it was true that he could knock her over with his pinkie finger, regardless of how he might feel about it. It occurred to Maddy, not for the first time, that he could kill her.

Not here, though. Not in the baked bean aisle. He’d never seemed dangerous, and even now the thought of his physically harming her almost made Maddy laugh; but he was stronger than she was, and he was desperate, and desperation drove people to do things you wouldn’t expect. Like destroy someone whose existence they found inconvenient, as he was capable of doing to her, as he was asking her to do to their child. Besides, horrible things happened all the time to girls like her, motherless, adrift. The only creature in the world that would miss Maddy if she disappeared, or at least the first who would notice, was an owl she worked with at the wildlife rehabilitation center where she volunteered, who courted her by leaving her gifts of his uneaten dead mice.

A thirtysomething woman in a pink camo hoodie, jean shorts, and flip-flops rounded the corner and shuffled down the aisle with a twelve-pack of Mountain Dew under her arm. Maddy’s lover drew back against a shelf of Heinz condiments, standing as far from her as he could, and the sight of him cowering against ketchup rekindled her anger. She wanted to wound him. She needed him to know she didn’t love him, to believe he had been nothing but an antidote to her boredom, her unbearable sadness. After the woman in camo turned the corner and disappeared, she said, This was never about you, you know.

She meant it as a blow to his ego, which she pictured as something alive and compact and, for some reason, furry, like a hamster running forever in a wheel inside the iron cage of him. She had meant to make it sound like she was cavalier enough to use him for casual fun. But he only said, I know, and for that I am truly sorry, and added a can of crushed tomatoes to his cart. You have someone to drive you?

She nodded, thought of Jada, three hours away and unaware of the pregnancy. They hadn’t spoken in months, hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. She knew Jada would want to be the first person she’d consult, would want to save her. For her, the solution to Maddy’s problem would be clear. She would promise not to judge Maddy for choosing what anybody could see was the right option. Everybody always pretended they wouldn’t judge you, but they did so assuming you’d come around to their point of view, assuming you’d choose correctly.

Maddy searched the library of her mind for her earliest image of her sister, thinking it might somehow be the purest, and found a hazy picture of Jada dressing for a school dance she’d gone to with Drew. She must have been sixteen or seventeen, Maddy four or five. Maddy remembered watching her emerge from her bedroom like a queen about to address a horde of stinky commoners, her mother zipping the back of Jada’s dress up to a point between her shoulder blades. She saw the narrow stem of Jada’s neck; she saw her mother dab powder from a compact onto Jada’s nose, heard the compact snap shut; she watched her mother hold something out to Jada, heard Jada say, No, no lipstick. Big sister went off to the ball bare-lipped while little sister smeared the rose-red stick across her mouth, perched on a step stool before the bathroom mirror, dreaming of dancing, clowning her face with wax.

A long silence had stretched in the baked bean aisle. He said, Well, then, and stuck out his hand, looking both ways as if about to cross a busy street.

Maddy stared at the hand. The furry knuckles, the clean nails.

You’re still going to help me, right? she said. With the other stuff?

Of course.

You promised.

He was still standing there with his hand out. I’ll do my best.

She took the hand. They shook. Then he said, Take care, Maddy, and walked away.

Take care, take care—she repeated the words in her head until they clumped together, shifting shapes, their meaning loosening and finally separating from them. Take care, take air, caretake. Care of what? He could have meant a baby. Do the right thing—he hadn’t said what it was. Maddy pushed her cart in the opposite direction from where he’d gone, moving toward meat, her stomach turning at the sight of raw chicken breasts on Styrofoam beds. It was cold in the store. Goose bumps formed on her arms.

Did she want a child? Did it matter? Like him, she’d thought at first that she should get rid of it. But then fear had clamped down on her heart like a claw. She’d seen those pictures of dead fetuses like mangled cocktail shrimp, bloody feet on roadside billboards threatening damnation. If asked, Maddy would have denied believing in hell, at least until faced with the prospect that she might go there. Now suddenly it loomed.

She looked down at the envelope he’d given her, turned it slot-side up, and worked the gold clasp out of its hole. He hadn’t licked the adhesive. She peeked inside and thumbed the bills she’d later count to confirm: four thousand dollars.

She wanted her mother. Panic rose in her chest, and she paused, breathing from her belly the way the school counselor had taught her in the brief time that Maddy saw her before graduating. The counselor had given her mantras to repeat when the panic struck. I am stronger than my grief. I am going to be okay. The same things her lover had said to her just now, or thereabouts, as if he’d known their power. I am going to be okay, she recited, rolling her way down the candy aisle. It was a phrase she repeated to herself almost daily, it was the thing she worked hardest to believe, and yet now that he’d said it to her it felt cheap, canned. Maddy swiped a bag of gummy bears from a shelf, tore it open, and popped a rainbow of bears two by two into her mouth.

No, she didn’t want a baby. But she didn’t not want one, either. She wanted only not to be in the situation she was in. She wanted not to have to choose.

The Haribo bag was half-empty by the time she wheeled her buggy down the checkout lane. She sealed the bag and placed it on the conveyor belt, then opened the envelope. Crisp hundred-dollar bills, collated into bricks and gum-banded together.

This all? the cashier asked, scanning the gummy bears. Her name tag read KAITLIN. She was about Maddy’s age and, Maddy noticed, also pregnant. Maddy slid a bill from its pack and studied Ben Franklin’s face, the droopy eyes and pursed lips. Didn’t he have glasses? She’d thought he had glasses. But what did she know about founding fathers?

No, she said, folding and unfolding the bill, taking in the rows of tabloids and candy that surrounded her. That’s not all.

She grabbed a Snickers bar, then two. A box of mints. Two packages of bubble gum, the kind that only held its flavor for the first few glorious chews. A magazine: RADICAL SPRING BEAUTY: QUICK FIXES FOR HAIR & SKIN! A bag of Twizzlers, a stick of cherry ChapStick, two bars of Daffin’s milk chocolate from a fundraiser box. Three bags of Peanut M&M’s, her dad’s favorite. She knew his new girlfriend Carole Ann’s favorite candy, too—3 Musketeers—and grabbed one for her before thinking twice and putting it back. She bore Carole Ann no ill will, but neither did she wish to shower her in gifts, to suggest that the three of them were some sort of family—her father, his girlfriend, and Maddy, cleaning houses for money and nursing birds in her spare time and still living at home, not a third musketeer but a third wheel, as squeaky and sad as the one on the buggy she now pushed to the end of the checkout aisle. The cashier bagged her stash and rolled her eyes when Maddy handed her the hundred.

You don’t have nothing smaller?

No.

Kaitlin gave Maddy a suspicious look and held the bill up to the light.

It’s real, Maddy said, too loudly.

Kaitlin stuffed Ben into the register and sluggishly counted change. Aren’t you fancy, she said.

In her car, her mother’s old Taurus, Maddy tore open a chocolate bar and stuffed the manila envelope crookedly beneath the passenger seat so that only an orange triangle poked out like a beak. She’d left the store with three thousand nine hundred seventy-some dollars, but the weight of the coins where the bill had been gave the illusion that she was leaving with more than she’d started with. That nothing had been lost.

Friday night, almost time for Dateline. Since her mother’s death, Maddy and her father had feasted on late-night crime shows. She’d grown hungry for the sight of other people’s suffering. Her fear that she could join their grisly ranks at any time, be stuffed in a trunk, buried in the woods, a body found in a cornfield outside of town, was a welcome reminder: she was alive, and she wanted to stay that way. She would not, as it was sometimes tempting to believe since she lost her mother, rather have died along with her.

Inside her parents’—her father’s—house, Maddy hung her jacket on a deer-foot coatrack, slipping the collar over the ledge of a cloven hoof. She plopped down on the other end of the couch from where her father slumped, feet on the coffee table as her mother would not have allowed, boots untied but