Ashley Audrain
THE PUSH
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
A Year and a Half Later
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Ashley Audrain began writing The Push after leaving her job as publicity director at Penguin Books Canada to raise her two young children. At Penguin, she worked with bestselling authors including Khaled Hosseini, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Meg Wolitzer. Prior to Penguin, she worked at a global public relations agency in consumer marketing.
For Oscar and Waverly
It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born ….
Layne Redmond,
When the Drummers Were Women
Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire.
The drapes she chose for the windows look like linen. Expensive linen. The weave is loose enough that I can usually read your mood. I can watch the girl flip her ponytail while she finishes homework. I can watch the little boy toss tennis balls at the twelve-foot ceiling while your wife lunges around the living room in leggings, reversing the day’s mess. Toys back in the basket. Pillows back on the couch.
Tonight, though, you’ve left the drapes open. Maybe to see the snow falling. Maybe so your daughter could look for reindeer. She’s long stopped believing, but she will pretend for you. Anything for you.
You’ve all dressed up. The children are in matching plaid, sitting on the leather ottoman as your wife takes their picture with her phone. The girl is holding the boy’s hand. You’re fiddling with the record player at the back of the room and your wife is speaking to you, but you hold up a finger – you’ve almost got it. The girl jumps up and your wife, she sweeps up the boy, and they spin. You lift a drink, Scotch, and sip it once, twice, and slink from the record like it’s a sleeping baby. That’s how you always start to dance. You take him. He throws his head back. You tip him upside down. Your daughter reaches up for Daddy’s kiss and your wife holds your drink for you. She sways over to the tree and adjusts a string of lights that isn’t sitting quite right. And then you all stop and lean toward one another and shout something in unison, some word, perfectly timed, and then you all move again – this is a song you know well. Your wife slips out of the room and her son’s face follows robotically. I remember that feeling. Of being the needed one.
Matches. She comes back to light the candles on the decorated mantel and I wonder if the snaking fir boughs are real, if they smell like the tree farm. I let myself imagine, for a moment, watching those boughs go up in flames while you all sleep tonight. I imagine the warm, butter-yellow glow of your house turning to a hot, crackling red.
The boy has picked up an iron poker and the girl gently takes it away before you or your wife notices. The good sister. The helper. The protector.
I don’t normally watch for this long, but you’re all so beautiful tonight and I can’t bring myself to leave. The snow, the kind that sticks, the kind she’ll roll into snowmen in the morning to please her little brother. I turn on my wipers, adjust the heat, and notice the clock change from 7:29 to 7:30. This is when you’d have read her The Polar Express.
Your wife, she’s in the chair now, and she’s watching the three of you bounce around the room. She laughs and collects her long, loose curls to the side. She smells your drink and puts it down. She smiles. Your back is to her so you can’t see what I can, that she’s holding her stomach with one hand, that she rubs herself ever so slightly and then looks down, that she’s lost in the thought of what’s growing inside her. They are cells. But they are everything. You turn around and her attention is pulled back to the room. To the people she loves.
She will tell you tomorrow morning.
I still know her so well.
I look down to put on my gloves. When I look back up the girl is standing at your open front
