Graceful Burdens (Out of Line collection) Read online

  “Motherfucker,” Seraphina muttered. The kids stared at her wide-eyed, and Seraphina lay down on the cool marble floor and willed herself not to scream. When Paul came home from work, he found Seraphina like that and the children watching television. He did not dare to ask her why she was on the kitchen floor, and she offered no explanation.

  Hadley was the kind of patron who did not pretend why she was in the library. She didn’t go in teary-eyed or desperate with longing. She went straight to the nursery and slowly walked along the row of cribs, looking at each baby, placid in her demeanor. Her chest tightened, and she reminded herself that she was only there to borrow. She enjoyed the relief of that reminder though she knew she could never admit she felt it. The quietest, saddest-looking baby was the one she wanted. It was a girl, of course, sitting in her crib, maybe seven months old. The baby, Gemma, had big brown eyes and strong features. She would grow into a handsome woman, the kind who resented being told she was handsome because she understood that to be handsome was to be not pretty and to be not pretty was to be invisible. Hadley reached into the crib, and Gemma locked eyes with her. The baby didn’t blink or squirm as Hadley pulled Gemma into her arms. Hadley pressed her cheek against the baby’s, marveled at the softness of it. She wanted to press her lips against Gemma’s skin but restrained herself. “I’ll take this one,” she said to Sidra. Sidra nodded curtly and started to make the necessary preparations. An hour later, Hadley had a car seat, a diaper bag, and a baby. Her blood rushed hotly beneath her skin, and she wanted to run with the baby, but she did not know where she could run and not be found.

  If she thought about it too hard, she would wonder why library babies were available, where they came from, and she did not want to consider such questions. As she drove home, she stared at the baby in the rearview mirror and the baby stared back, sucking on three of her fingers. “Where is your mother?” Hadley asked, and Gemma gurgled, making nonsense sounds, and then she quieted again.

  Later that evening in her efficiency, Hadley sat cross-legged on her bed, tickling Gemma’s feet, which sent the baby into fits of tiny laughter. The sound was so bright and clean, a perfect sound if ever there were one. When the baby eventually fell asleep, Hadley lay on her side next to the child, watching Gemma’s chest rise and fall faster than seemed possible. The urge to run away rushed through her once more, and she realized that she did not want to run with the child because she needed to mother. She wanted to run with the child so the child’s future would not be dictated by whether or not she could mother.

  Hadley never thought borrowing a baby would ease the persistent ache, the loneliness that clung to her since she turned her back on her family or, she supposed, they turned their backs on her, but she had assumed it would provide some measure of temporary solace. It did not. Her bitterness sharpened. She thought of her seven sisters, four of whom were still under the age of sixteen, who still did not know what kind of life they would yet live. In some ways she envied her younger sisters and their uncompromised faith in their bodies, in the world, in the system controlling everything they knew. She wondered if they ever thought of her. Gemma started whimpering, her lower lip trembling. “You’re hungry,” Hadley said, and she thought she saw the baby nod. She quickly prepared a bottle and cradled Gemma in the bend of her arm. The baby grabbed at the bottle eagerly but clumsily, and soon she was suckling, offering up tiny exhalations with each sip of milk.

  The bottle was nearly empty when Hadley heard a knock at her door. Her body went rigid. She knew no one but her coworkers or the men in bars who had no idea or interest in where she lived. “Who is it?” she asked as she stood behind the door, wishing, for the first time, that her building had the modern amenities of decent places to live—monitors and security cameras and all the ambient technology that made life bearable for most people.

  “We’re friends,” a muffled voice, a woman’s voice, said from the other side of the door.

  “I don’t have any friends,” Hadley said. She looked at the baby, drowsy and milk fed in her arms. Perhaps she really wasn’t meant to be a mother, she thought as she opened the door. A woman meant to be a mother would have probably been more concerned for the baby’s safety, for her own safety. But she also knew some lives mattered and some lives didn’t.

  Standing in the concrete hallway were two young women, in their late twenties, Hadley guessed. There was a tension between them she could not quite place. Hadley held the baby more firmly. “What do you want?” Her voice was sharp, too sharp, she worried, and then she chastised herself for that worry. She owed these strangers nothing. The girl she had been worried about the tone of her voice and the manner of her words. The woman she had become had no need for such affectations.

  The shorter of the two women, a petite woman with dark-brown skin and a spiral of tight curls gracing her head, stepped forward. “We are here on the behalf of the Society of Venus.”

  Hadley stared blankly. “That means nothing to me, and whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

  The stranger’s companion, a grandly large woman who seemed to take pride in how much space she took, also stepped forward. “I understand that you think you aren’t interested, but I assure you, you are. We are not here to sell you anything. We are not here to waste your time. We are here because you are one of us.”

  Hadley tried to shut the door, but the grandly large woman stretched out one of her long, thick arms, planting her hand flat against the door. Hadley was surprised by the strength of the woman’s resistance.

  “I’m afraid we must insist that you hear us out,” the woman said.

  “Fine,” Hadley said quietly. “I don’t really care, either way.” She stepped aside and waved the women into her apartment. “It’s an efficiency, so you’re going to have to sit on the bed if you need to sit down,” she said. The baby stirred but did not wake. Hadley cradled Gemma, turning away from the strange women as if that might keep the infant safe.

  The grandly large woman sat on the edge of the bed, and it squeaked mightily as she sank into the thin mattress. She sighed. “We don’t have much time. Like you, we are unlicensed women, but we see it as a blessing, not a burden. We think you do, too.” She looked around the bare apartment. “You don’t have to live like this. Your life can have purpose.”

  Hadley raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think my life doesn’t have purpose?”

  The petite woman snorted. “You borrowed a baby from a library. We could start there and not even get into this . . . place you’re living in.”

  Hadley looked down at Gemma and held the baby closer. “Lots of women borrow babies. It isn’t a crime.”

  “It is a moral crime at the very least,” the petite woman said. “But first, we should introduce ourselves properly. I am Chloe, and this is my partner, Gabriella. We rescue borrowed babies.”

  “Among other things,” Gabriella said dryly.

  A few hours later, Hadley had packed a small bag for herself and bundled Gemma up. She was reeling from all she had learned, but she quietly followed Gabriella and Chloe to their waiting car, a pickup, the big kind farmers drove. Hadley sat in the cramped second row of the cab, drowsy as the miles passed. She watched the couple in the front row with half-lidded eyes. They were affectionate with each other in a way she had never seen women be affectionate. There was such warmth between them, and she envied their intimacy. She hadn’t been touched gently in so long. She hadn’t wanted any part of gentleness, but now, maybe, she did. She studied Gemma’s delicate features as she sat in a car seat and wondered anew who she had once belonged to before she belonged to everyone.

  They were driving north. Hadley woke up briefly and Chloe and Gabriella had switched positions. They crossed into South Dakota and then headed east toward Minnesota. No one talked much. Any questions she had, Hadley kept to herself. Every few hours they stopped for gas, bad coffee, fresh air, and a diaper change for the baby. They mostly kept to back roads so they wouldn’t have to answer questio
ns about why three unlicensed women were traveling with a baby. In Blue Earth, Minnesota, they finally stopped to rest for a few hours, get clean, eat something warm. Hadley took a hot shower in her motel room. She and Gemma walked into town, and she had lunch, feeding the baby soft bits of this and that. Sated, they sat in a park at the center of which was a statue of a green giant. There were a few families in the park, laughing children and their doting mothers, only one father in sight. Plus ça change, Hadley thought.

  Gabriella and Chloe got their own room, and from the way they’d looked at each other as they walked away from the truck, Hadley could guess what they were going to do before they fell asleep. As she headed back to the motel, Hadley was lost in her thoughts, talking to Gemma about everything they saw—the storefronts, the large golden retriever resting his face on his front paws near an empty bench, the Christmas lights hanging from all the streetlamps even though Christmas was months away. She did not notice the police officer standing in the middle of the sidewalk just outside the motel, and then she did. Hadley stopped abruptly, startling the baby, who hiccuped and started crying. Hadley looked around but tried to stay calm. And then she clenched her jaw and kept walking like she had always lived in this town. The officer stared at Hadley, and she tried as best she could to hold his gaze.

  “You going to do something about that crying baby?” he asked.

  Hadley shrugged. “There isn’t much you can do about a crying baby. I reckon she will stop when she’s ready to stop.”

  The officer stuck his thumbs in his utility belt and looked Hadley up and down. “You’re not from around here, are you? I’m going to need to see you and this baby’s papers. Where is this baby’s father?”

  “We’re just visiting family,” Hadley said. She forced herself to smile brightly, the kind of smile that usually charmed men who were overly enamored with their own authority. “I don’t have our papers on me as we’re just taking a walk. I’m sure you understand.”

  Hadley turned to walk away, but suddenly she felt a tight grip on her arm. She looked down at the officer’s hand. Gemma stopped crying and stared with wide eyes. “You should unhand me, Officer. You should know better than to touch a licensed woman, what with your being unlicensed and all.” The officer reddened, and Hadley shrugged out of his grip. “You would do well not to interfere with licensed women and their issue.” Hadley’s eyes narrowed, and she raised her chin. “I should report you, but as I am on vacation, I don’t have time for the bureaucratic hassle of taking an unlicensed man to task.”

  Chastened, the officer stepped away, his lower lip trembling with fear or rage or both, Hadley did not know. She quickened her step, and as she walked away, she willed herself not to collapse as her entire body began trembling. Back at the motel, she went immediately to Gabriella and Chloe’s room, pounding on their door. She heard muffled laughter and something moving around. Gabriella finally came to the door, a sheet wrapped around her body, her hair mussed. “What is it? Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  Hadley fell to her knees, still holding Gemma tightly as the adrenaline left her body. “A cop just asked me for my papers, and I got rid of him, but I don’t know if we should stay here much longer.” Gabriella leaned down and helped Hadley to her feet and into the room, which was dark and smelled stale. Chloe was in bed under a garishly patterned bedspread, and the TV on the dresser was muted, images of some sporting event flashing on the screen. Hadley repeated her story and Gabriella and Chloe exchanged a look and then they were dressing and then they were all back in the truck, traveling east and then north again. When they reached Duluth, they began driving along Lake Superior, the sun shining brightly on the clear blue expanse of the lake.

  Chloe was the talkative one, and before long, Hadley was certain she had learned everything there was to know about both women. She knew the women were nannies when they weren’t recruiting women like her to rescue library babies, both working for the same family, a luxury Hadley found unfathomable. They had never felt anything but freedom in being unlicensed, and before they’d joined the Society of Venus, they had planned on immigrating to Iceland together because they knew it was one of the few countries that welcomed genetic diversity and the imperfections of natural families.

  It was dark out and they had been driving for more than eight hours when they reached Thunder Bay. They pulled off the two-lane highway and began heading down a gravel road. After a mile or so, Gabriella turned off the lights and slowed to a crawl and then she stopped. “We walk from here,” she said.

  They gathered the baby and their things, and with a flashlight, Gabriella led the way, holding Chloe’s hand as they walked another mile into the darkness. The light was a tiny point in the night at first, but as they got closer, the frame of a small house appeared. The couple didn’t even knock, just let themselves into the house, where they found a group of four women sitting in front of a fire drinking something from clay mugs. They all looked up at the four newcomers. The house smelled safe, and the air was heavy with warmth. Hadley relaxed for the first time since leaving Blue Earth.

  “Close the door,” a woman with short, neatly trimmed gray hair said, and Hadley did as instructed. Gemma slept soundly, had been for hours, a small grace. A young woman, not much older than Hadley, stood, staring at Gemma. As she got closer, Hadley could see that her eyes were filled with tears. She reached for the baby, and Hadley stepped back instinctively.

  “She’s mine,” the young woman said. “She’s my baby.”

  Gabriella and Chloe each placed a gentle hand on Hadley’s shoulders. Hadley looked down at the sleeping child in her arms, pressed her lips to the baby’s forehead, and then held the baby out. The young woman hugged Gemma to her tightly, and the baby woke, blinking sleepily as she took in these new surroundings.

  “I never thought I would see her again,” the woman said into the baby’s neck. “They took her from me in the hospital. Fucking animals.”

  Back in her efficiency, Gabriella and Chloe had told Hadley where the library babies came from, how they were the progeny of liaisons between licensed men and unlicensed women who would, when they aged out of the lending program, be sold into indenture or worse. It had taken several minutes for Hadley to wrap her mind around it all. All her life she had been told that such children could never exist, that such liaisons could never happen. And now she knew different, that there were women whose children were taken from them while the men who fathered those children lost nothing.

  “Gemma’s a sweet baby,” Hadley said. “Real sweet.”

  The young woman nodded. “I can’t wait to get to know her.”

  “You’ve come a long way,” the gray-haired woman said. “You all should get some sleep. We can talk more in the morning.”

  Sleeping arrangements were quickly made, and Hadley found herself in a small room on a small but comfortable bed. She turned to face the wall and did not remember falling asleep. When she woke, bright shafts of light spilled into the room and across her body. She stretched her limbs and threw her feet over the edge of the bed, standing slowly. Cracking her neck, she headed downstairs, where the gray-haired woman stood in the kitchen making sandwiches.

  “Where is everyone?” Hadley asked. “What time is it?”

  “You can call me Sue because that’s my name,” the woman said. “And it’s just past noon. As for Radhika, she and Gemma are already on a ship on their way to Iceland. Gabriella and Chloe are on their way back to their lives until the next time they are needed. And you, my dear, where you go next, what you do next, is your choice.”

  Sue set a sandwich and a glass of iced tea on the kitchen table and motioned for Hadley to sit. Hadley was ravenous and took large bites of the sandwich, barely chewing before she swallowed and ate more. Sue watched with amusement, setting a second and third sandwich in front of Hadley. “You sure can pack it away.”

  Hadley nodded, still chewing, and took a long sip of iced tea. “I finally have an appetite.” When she could not eat a
single bite more, Hadley pushed her chair away from the table, stretching her legs out in front of her. “I know I don’t want to go back to where I was,” she said. “And I know I’ve never been able to choose much of anything in my life.”

  The older woman disappeared, then returned a few minutes later. She set two pictures in front of Hadley. She pointed to a baby’s picture first. “This is Penelope. She’s five months old, at the Minneapolis Public Library.” She pointed to a young woman’s picture. “And this is her mother, Ronnie, who has never held her own child. We can do something about that.”

  When she was fourteen, just before she had to worry about licensing, before she understood what it would mean to be a woman, Hadley spent her summer days running in the open field behind her family’s home, her arms outstretched as if they might become wings. There was one day when she and her siblings were playing in an abandoned barn not far from their home. They were up in the loft, the doors flung open. It was crazy hot and the heat pulsed around them in waves and they were bored and up to no good. Her brother Axel dared her to jump out of the loft, and Hadley looked out at the ground, twenty feet below. She knew she shouldn’t jump, but she walked to the back of the loft, threw her arms open, and ran as fast as she could. Her brothers and sisters began shrieking with glee, with terror. As she ran past the ledge, a gust of wind buffeted Hadley, and no matter what happened next, she was exhilarated to be flying into the unknown.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Reginald Cunningham

  Roxane Gay is the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collection Bad Feminist and the memoir Hunger, as well as the novel An Untamed State and the short story collection Difficult Women. She edited The Best American Short Stories 2018, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She wrote World of Wakanda for Marvel Comics and is at work on several book, film, and television projects.