Nadine wanted to refuse, she would not raise another woman’s children, she wanted to leave him but she hadn’t. He had chosen her, hadn’t he? He could just as easily have taken off with the white girl, but he had chosen her, chosen to stay with her, and so some vanity in her, a vanity, of course, tinged with racial vindictiveness, made her take his choice as an honour.
The truth, she knew, was that Derek was a vain man, not a forward-thinking man. He could not start over again with another woman. He had been quite comfortable living in that way with Angie on the side. Nadine calculated, counted on that streak of conservativism in Derek. When she finally agreed to take his children in, it was with another calculation. That he would never be able to thank her. That would be their pact. Something else involuntarily crept into the bargain. Nadine gradually and sometimes violently ceased to love Derek. What she felt for him was certainly strong but it was not love. Another fascination took hold of her—why Angie? What did Derek see in Angie? Nadine was tortured by this. The thought also occurred to her that taking the children would reveal this. That Derek could betray her for someone less worthy was to her impossible. So how was Angie more worthy?
She searched the children’s faces for what element there might reveal Angie’s attraction. But what it took for her to take care of another woman’s children without cruelty was every ounce of her sense of herself as a good human being. It wasn’t hard with the baby. He was like an unformed bit of matter, he knew nothing. But Carla was a brooding, watchful little girl who was grieving for her mother. She would sometimes ask Derek when Angie was coming for her and the baby. Derek would bark at her eventually, saying that Angie wasn’t coming back and that she should be quiet. The child was unhappy, and in those early days Nadine could not bring herself to comfort her. Carla would sink into quietness and strangeness. All Nadine could summon up was a prissy reprimand of Derek: “The little girl has lost her mother, you’re her father. You should explain it to her.” Nadine really meant “You’ll spend a lifetime explaining it to me.”
You can’t resent children for long. Or at least Nadine couldn’t. She didn’t have it in her. Some did—there were stories of child abuse in the papers every day. One poor boy beaten to death by his stepmother and father after he’d come to the city from Jamaica. Nadine knew where her anger was. Derek was the one who should suffer. She ignored her sisters hissing at her on the telephone about why she should not be taking care of Derek’s bastards. She made Derek blunder through the first month of feeding and dressing and taking care; begging his mother to help out. She wanted him to know just what he would owe if she took on the task of caring for Carla and Jamal. And despite herself she came to give them a kind of love, especially the baby, who didn’t have the reserve of the little girl.
The sisters found her behaviour unusual. In the years that passed they shook their heads at her, saying she was either stupid or a saint for taking on the burden of Derek’s children. And they did not know and Nadine did not confide in them what a struggle she had in damping down her hurt and resentment, her feelings of utter betrayal. She had turned a corner morally in being able to bring anything like love to her relationship with these children. She took it as a triumph over Derek, over herself, over conventional wisdom, to come to the point of considering Angie’s children her own. The complexities of this triumph—some distorted, some like an epiphany—she never revealed or for that matter understood herself. She felt guilty about Angie. Why? Because Angie had killed herself in some respects because of her, Nadine. Her existence, which stood in the way. Was that vanity too? she wondered. Angie had killed herself because of Derek’s callousness. Or perhaps Angie was mad, as Derek said, and had killed herself because of that. Whatever it was, Nadine felt guilty. She should have put a clean stop to it long ago.
There was a terrible flattery also in Angie’s death. For Derek. Nadine had overheard a man at a social function pointing to Derek as they passed by and saying in an appreciative tone, “Woman kill herself for him, you know?” She shared in this flattery, as women in her social circle told her better Angie than she, and complimented her on sticking it out or encouraged her to leave his ass now. So for all this terrible praise she took extra care of Angie’s poor children. It was the sign that she had no malice toward Angie, no malice for a dead woman; that she was better than Angie. And anyway, why should these children suffer because Derek couldn’t keep his fly zipped? And she was not about to let them suffer so that people would say that her jealousy made her mistreat them. She would take instead the beatific garment offered to her, taking Carla and Jamal in and loving them.
And she had. She had loved them. Beyond what she had thought possible. That’s the thing with children. They opened a person up. They came with their own presences and opened you up. Now Nadine could not recall with the same intensity ever not
