“Good that you mention it.”
“Excuse me?” Denise blinked as Ralph reached into his pocket and pulled out three wads of cash.
“Here are a few bills for Laila. I’ll be sending money every month for her until . . . we figure our stuff out. And if there’s any left over, use it for you and Amara.”
Denise looked at Ralph, whose bottom lip was set to tremble with his pleading, and concluded that she must not hurt his already wounded pride. She placed a hand on the money and nodded at him before he saw himself out. Once he turned his back on her, she lifted her hand and began to count each bill. There was enough cash to cover the rent for at least six months, groceries, and incidentals. This was 1998, and everything was changing. White people were trickling in, unlike in the eighties, when they wouldn’t venture beyond Ninety-Sixth and Broadway. She suspected that this was just the beginning and that rent was going to skyrocket. She’d already heard about other people whose rents had been raised twenty-five or fifty dollars a month—not enough to panic but enough to brace oneself. So far, Denise and her landlord had been chummy since they were classmates at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s day school. He could charge more, especially if some Columbia or NYU students began to inquire, but he promised Denise that he wouldn’t get rid of her for anything in the world. To him, Harlemites needed to remain in Harlem. Nevertheless, Denise recognized that money was still green, and everyone and everything could be bought in a matter of time.
Before Ralph left, he shot a glance at the staircase and saw Amara standing at the top. He did not speak because he sensed that Amara did not want a conversation, and neither did he. Maybe she’d heard all that he confessed to Denise. He tipped his head at her and turned his back at the same time she scurried back into her room. Amara planted her face in her pillows but faced toward the door and hoped that her mother would knock and tell her what was going on. But that talk never happened.
The apartment remained uncomfortably still for the rest of the night, until the next morning, when Denise picked Laila up from the hospital and set her up in the room next to Amara’s. By that afternoon, Laila’s sniffling and weeping seeped through Amara’s bedroom walls and ruined her ability to focus on anything. Whenever Laila wasn’t crying, Amara could hear her talking to herself in random broken sentences. Amara decided not to stay at her Columbia dorm because she would feel guilty leaving her mother all alone with Laila. But if she stayed, she couldn’t concentrate on her work—and it wasn’t like she could help. Amara fretted over the day and the hour that both her mother and aunt would find out about her secret. After all, she was already four months along when Laila settled into their home.
She had not planned for it to happen. During the first few weeks of spring semester sophomore year, she found herself already behind in her reading for her Law & Ethics course. The only way to focus was to shut off her phone and check in with her accountability partner, Elijah. Elijah had an on-and-off-again relationship with his high school sweetheart, who anxiously awaited a proposal as soon as he graduated. He was someone with whom she’d struck up a rapport during admitted students’ week, and they worked alongside each other in her dorm. One night while studying, she kept her cell phone on silent, and the alarm to remind her to take her birth control pill, which she’d been prescribed for acne, was neglected. As the night progressed, their concentration loosened and they started to crack jokes. Elijah pulled out two joints from his back pocket and asked if she would like a smoke. She agreed, and before dawn, they were naked beside each other in her soiled sheets. They never spoke of the night ever again. Amara never pried. When she first felt her stomach contort into knots in Butler Library, she thought it was indigestion from another greasy quesadilla, but the pain persisted for a week. Her period hadn’t arrived in months, but even with the pill, her cycle had always been erratic. Yet her sense of smell was so acute that the soap on someone’s body could make her gag, and she blew her monthly allowance on food in a week and a half. She bought three pregnancy tests down in Kips Bay, where no one would recognize her, and took each one in a Murray Hill theater bathroom stall. All came out positive. A doctor at a Washington Heights birth clinic where she booked an appointment under a pseudonym confirmed the pregnancy at eight weeks exactly. This wasn’t supposed to happen to her. But she didn’t want to get an abortion, for who would go with her, a friend? And could that friend keep a secret for the rest of their lives?
From the time of that doctor visit to days after Laila’s arrival, Amara tried all kinds of abortifacients. She took a bath with boiling-hot water and removed herself from the tub with nothing but peeled, reddish skin to show for it. Not even three cups of St. John’s wort tea did the trick. The consumption incapacitated her, leaving her dizzy and sensitive to any light. Then the flutters in her belly came—sometimes while she brushed her teeth, sometimes when she touched a side of her stomach, and most times when she lay down at night. Once the flutters came, she stopped trying. The movement in her belly meant that there was actually something there, and once she was mindful of a potential person growing inside her body, she didn’t want to get an abortion.
