Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins (read any book .TXT) 📕

When Josephine went to check in with Maman, she discovered that her mother was still awake.

Josephine placed one hand on Maman’s bedroom door and heard the scraping sound of a pen dragging across a sheet of paper on her cherrywood desk. She knocked with the other hand and heard Maman sigh. The springs on her bed creaked. The TV was playing at a low volume. Josephine knocked twice.

“Yes?” Maman called out.

“Can I come in?”

“Must you?”

Josephine twisted the doorknob and let herself in. Maman moved closer to the edge of the bed and grabbed onto the sides of the mattress. When Maman did not rise to her feet, Josephine proceeded to lock the door and start toward Maman’s desk chair. Her mother’s eyes, unblinking and glaring, followed her to where she sat. They sat across from each other with their hands wedged between their thighs. Maman squinted. “I didn’t think you had any of that in you.”

“Had what?”

“Never mind. What’s going on? You’re disturbing me.”

“I couldn’t be up in that room tonight.” Josephine looked off to the side, beyond Maman’s left ear, and shook her head repeatedly. “Not tonight.”

“Isn’t Landon here? I know I heard his footsteps going up the stairs.”

“He’s there with Hallow. I left them alone. Both of them were getting on my nerves.”

“Both of them, huh?”

“Both of them!”

“Both of them, huh?”

“Yes, Maman, I already answered your question.”

“I just wanted to be sure.” Maman pulled out the top drawer of her nightstand, where a blunt lay beside a copy of the Book of Common Prayer and a miniature bottle of absinthe. She placed the blunt in her mouth and produced a lighter while giggling to herself. She laughed and ignited the end of her blunt. Her fingers curled as the blunt lowered from her mouth so she could blow the smoke toward the ceiling. She closed her eyes and grinned, then tipped her head down to acknowledge Josephine. “Welcome to motherhood.” Maman handed Josephine the blunt, and Josephine took a long pull.

“There you go. You still got it.”

“You know I don’t like to smoke.”

“It’s probably because you got it all out of your system. You stole a lot of mine when you were a teenager, but the body always remembers, you see. The body always remembers.”

Josephine tapped the blunt onto the ashtray on the desk near Maman’s papers and said, “The body remembers, yes.”

Josephine lowered her head and passed the blunt back to her mother. She placed her face in her hands, and her shoulders bounced up and down in sync with her soft weeping. Maman sighed and took multiple hits of the blunt. She usually waited for whatever Josephine needed to release from what happened in her bedroom before she said or did anything. But this night was different, and Maman was feeling good. Once her head felt less compact and more airy and her upper back tingled like her muscles were readying to detonate, she leaned over and caressed Josephine’s abdomen. The touch froze Josephine into surprise.

“What are you doing?” Josephine hoarsely asked.

“I’m mothering you. You came down here for that, or did you just want to spill your frustrations?”

“I thought that was the same thing.”

“Are you looking for affection? That’s not the mother I ever was, Josephine. Still, you keep this fortysomething-year-old hope that I’ll be better to you in the way that you like it—sweet, saccharine, doting, devoted.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Then how would you say it?” Maman passed her the blunt and leaned forward. Even while sitting down, Maman was a massive figure. Her legs were parted underneath her muumuu, and they extended like branches. She stretched her long neck and moved her hand down her frame.

“I would say—” Josephine inhaled. “You and I are just different, that’s all.”

“Different? Heh. Josephine, you came from me. I knew you before you knew yourself.”

“You knew me as a child but not as a woman.”

Maman raised her eyebrows. “Well. Pass me my blunt, then. I’m listening.”

The cannabis hadn’t cleared the trees in Josephine’s mind yet. The more she inhaled, the more detached she was from anything that she was saying. “You don’t know me as a woman, Maman. You see me walking around here and helping you with the numbers from time to time or helping with Helena and Hallow, but you don’t know me. You don’t know what this body remembers.”

Maman leaned forward and caressed Josephine’s abdomen again. “Grief never goes away, you know. It comes through many forms. Maybe . . . Hallow is that new form. Unfortunately.”

“She might be. I didn’t think she was at first, but tonight, I’m not so sure. She had on this pretty little coat that Landon bought her, and I started to hate her. I hated her because as she spun around, I kept asking myself, ‘Whose pretty little child is this?’ But no, no, she’s mine. That’s my child, but I didn’t birth her. Yes, I take care of her, but she didn’t come from me. We are close, but there’s a deeper bond that we’ll never have. And you know we don’t do adoption. Our family has never done it. We never had to until now. And why would we? Whatever we needed we always found in one another, in our own blood. We never had to look outside of us.”

Maman sighed. “How long are you going to beat yourself up for that, though, Jo?”

“You mean for raising somebody else’s child?”

“She’s not someone else’s child. Shit. If I knew you were going to have this much guilt, we would’ve remained Catholics.” Maman scoffed.

Josephine half smiled and said, “I’m serious.”

“So am I. Here.” Maman reignited the end of the blunt and took a swig of her absinthe. “I would’ve made us both a glass of Sazerac like the old days. Every time a woman has a problem that a man just can’t fix, Sazerac helps—for the night, at least. But I don’t feel like getting up.”

“I know, I know. But I don’t want it.”

“You know, Jo,