Chapter Three
 

In her room, the one she shared with Garrett, her brother was still noisily sleeping in his twin bed shoved against the window. She’d heard before that children looked angelic when they slept, but she couldn’t say this about her brother. He looked like he’d been fighting a battle, first with sheets and then with air. He was on his back and his mouth was open. His body was big in his white t-shirt and underwear, and sooner than later he’d be a full-grown man in a child’s bed. When Marge had first told her about the Benadryl, Whitney had questioned her mother’s sanity but only for a moment. How can you question the adults when the adults make the decisions? They were the ones in charge. They knew better. Whitney reprimanded herself with this logic every time she found her brother knocked out cold from the spoon and bottle. She figured it was easy to judge when she got to leave every day and would even have the option of leaving forever when the time was right.

Whitney thought Marge was going to kill her, but as she took off Jamal’s blazer and wiped her hand against the back of her sweating neck, she felt for signs of life. She was still in one piece, no worse the wear. Her mother had just sat there, looking a bit perplexed like Whitney had told her she was thinking about sprouting wings and flying south for the winter.

“Pregnant.” It wasn’t a question for Marge but a statement she frankly left between them. Marge had picked up the Benadryl bottle and spoon, leftover detritus that often collected on her bed. “It’s like a black hole,” Whitney had said to Stacey once, and as Marge played the bottle and spoon against each other with her fleshy hands like two toy soldiers fighting on opposite sides, Whitney felt bad for the times her friend had called her mother “Large,” and Whitney hadn’t even thought twice. She loved her mother. She really did. She just didn’t love the person she’d become.

Whitney had been seven when it happened. Marge worked at the bakery downtown after Whitney’s father died. They had just moved into the trailer, and Stacey’s mom, still a somewhat permanent fixture in Stacey’s life, let Whitney stay the evenings with them next door while Marge worked. She got to sleep in her best friend’s bed, giggling until sleep broke her down, and there wasn’t any more room to laugh or cry that Lenny was gone forever. One morning, Marge didn’t come to pick her up. She had been gone all morning, and Whitney suffered a panic that felt like termites eating her insides. Stacey’s mom, Tabitha, kept saying, “Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s fine,” while darting her eyes through the windows. She had a kid to get to school and a part time job as a legal secretary. She wasn’t in the mood to be kept waiting. And the more she said it, the angrier the termites got, ripping through tissue and bone until Whitney imagined she looked like a hollowed-out jack-o-lantern. Finally, Tabitha made some calls to the police department and then the hospital. The only thing she would say was that Marge had had an accident, but that she was fine, everything was fine. It had been the same story Marge stuck to when she finally got home. 

But a few months later, Marge’s stomach began to grow, and Whitney questioned her about it. It wasn’t so much her belly but the dead in Marge’s eyes Whitney tried to decipher. 

“A parting gift from your Daddy,” Marge said, deadpan, even though he’d been dead a year by then, but Whitney was too young to understand. If that didn’t stop the questions, then Marge’s eyes certainly did.

Garrett was born, and that was that, except it wasn’t. Naturally a bigger woman, Marge gained even more weight. She stopped working and got on state welfare. Whitney went from wearing K-Mart clothes to other people’s worn-out scraps they donated to sorry sacks like themselves. And the hardest part was how Garrett never let them sleep. He would stay staring and moaning at the window or thwack around so hard in his bed, Whitney was sure she’d fall out of hers. She’d sneak the Benadryl sometimes at night and often crave it during the day at school when she’d groggily watch some teacher try to prepare her for her future.

Too late now, Whitney thought. She felt like she was in one of those runaway coal carts she’d see on cartoons, hurling itself down a long steep path to the edge of a cliff. She had no control over it, and even though deep down she wanted this baby—despite the ever-present fear that Marge was waiting to kill her in her sleep—there was another fear there that made her feel ashamed, inhuman even.

What if her baby turned out like her brother?