No Regrets This Time

Chapter 3

Melody married Nathan two years after that, in a backyard wedding with string lights and a bartender who over-poured every drink. She cried real tears walking down the aisle, the kind that ruined mascara, and I stood up front in a dress the color of good sand and watched Nathan watch her come toward him.

He looked happy. I want to be honest about that. He looked, genuinely, like a man getting something good.

He just also looked, for half a second, at me, before the doors opened. I've never told anyone that. I've barely let myself keep it.

By then, Obama and I had been married a year ourselves, in a ceremony that felt, in comparison, almost clinical — a nice venue downtown. This band played exactly the songs you'd expect, my mother, crying the acceptable amount and no more. Obama had cried too, actually, more than I expected, and I remember being surprised and moved by it, thinking, this is a man who feels things, even if he doesn't always say so.

Melody's wedding was different. Louder. Messier, in the good way — someone's cousin gave a toast that ran fourteen minutes and included at least one story that shouldn't have been told in mixed company, and the dance floor was still full at midnight, and Obama danced with Melody twice, which nobody thought anything of, because it was her wedding and he was her brother-in-law and that's simply a thing that happens at weddings.

I helped Melody get ready that morning; the two of us crammed into a hotel bathroom with too many bobby pins and not enough mirror, and she'd grabbed my hands at one point, uncharacteristically serious, and said, "Tell me I'm doing the right thing." I remember being so surprised by the question — Melody never asked for reassurance about anything, she simply did things and let the world catch up — that I fumbled the answer, said something generic about how happy Nathan made her, and she'd nodded and let it go, and I've wondered since what she actually needed me to say in that moment, and whether I failed to say it.

I remember watching them dance the second time — a faster song, something with a beat you couldn't help but move to — and thinking, distantly, that they moved well together, the way two people move well together when they're both naturally loose in their bodies, unselfconscious, easy. I remember thinking it the way you think a stray thought about weather, gone as quickly as it arrived.

I danced with Nathan once that night too, during a slow song near the end, both of us a little formal about it, hands placed correctly, a careful distance kept between our bodies that felt less like propriety and more like a wall one of us had built on purpose.

"You look happy," he said.

"I am happy."

"Good." He turned me, slow, careful. "You deserve that."

"So do you."

"I know," he said, and something in his voice made it sound less like agreement and more like a man convincing himself.

The song ended. We stepped apart at the same moment, like two dancers who'd rehearsed the exit even though we hadn't, and he went to find Melody, and I went to find Obama, and the night went on the way weddings do, loud and bright and full of people who loved us, and none of us said the true things sitting underneath any of it.

Sofia was born on a Thursday in March, three years later, nine pounds two ounces, furious about the whole business from the first breath, and Obama cried in a way I'd never seen him cry, not performative, not for an audience, just his shoulders shaking over the bassinet while a nurse pretended to check monitors that didn't need checking.

"She's got your mouth," he said. "God help us."

"She's got your stubbornness. God help everyone."

For a while after that, things were good. I don't say that to set up a fall — I say it because it's true, and because I think it matters that it was true. Obama was attentive in those first years, up at two a.m. with a bottle without being asked, proud of Sofia in a way that made him softer than I'd ever seen him. He'd stand at her crib some nights just watching her sleep, and I'd find him there and he wouldn't hear me come in, and there was something in his face in those moments — unguarded, almost boyish — that made me think, this is who he really is underneath everything else.

There's a photograph from that time I still keep, tucked into a drawer rather than displayed, of Obama asleep in the nursery glider with newborn Sofia on his chest, both of them out cold at three in the afternoon, his hand splayed protectively across her tiny back even in sleep. I took that photo standing in the doorway, not wanting to wake either of them, and I remember thinking, in that specific unguarded way new parents think things, that I had never loved anyone the way I loved the two of them in that chair, and that nothing could ever really touch it.

I told myself the current I'd felt under our marriage, that low hum of something not quite settled, was just new-parent exhaustion, the ordinary friction of two tired people sharing one small life.

There's a particular memory from Sofia's second year that I return to more than I'd like to admit, mostly because at the time it felt like nothing, and now it feels like the first thread I could have pulled if I'd only had the nerve. We were at Melody and Nathan's for a barbecue, one of the first warm enough evenings of the year, and Obama had gone inside to get more ice — the phrase alone makes something in my chest tighten now, even years later — and came back out a full twenty minutes later, sunburned in a way he hadn't been when he left, like he'd been standing somewhere in direct light he had no business standing in.

"Where'd you disappear to?" I'd asked, more curious than suspicious, still years from suspicion being a language I spoke fluently.

"Melody wanted help fixing the ceiling fan in the guest room," he said, easy, already reaching for Sofia, swinging her up onto his hip. "Wobbling like it was going to come down on someone's head."

I didn't check the fan. I didn't think to. It would be another four years before checking things became a habit I couldn't shake, and by then there'd be a great deal more to check than a ceiling fan nobody had actually fixed, not that spring, not ever, which I only learned much later, standing in that same guest room after the funeral, looking up at a fan that still wobbled exactly the way it always had.

My mother used to say that Melody and I were raised in the same house by two different mothers, which was her way of admitting, I think, that she'd parented us differently without ever quite meaning to. She was stricter with me, the older one, the one who was supposed to model something for the younger, and looser with Melody, who could talk her way out of curfews and report cards with a kind of charm that seemed to come from nowhere.

"You worry too much," Melody told me once, the two of us on my back porch with a bottle of wine between us, Sofia maybe two, already asleep, Obama out at some work function I hadn't wanted to attend. "You've always worried too much. Even as a kid. You used to check the stove twice before we left for school."

"Somebody has to check the stove."

"Somebody has to also just live a little." She topped off my glass without asking, the way she always did, and I let her, the way I always let her. "You got the good husband and the good house and the good kid, and you still walk around like you're waiting for a test result."

"Maybe I am."

She laughed, and I laughed with her, and I didn't tell her what I meant by it, some half-formed dread I couldn't have named even if she'd pushed. She didn't push. Melody never pushed on the things that actually mattered to me, which I used to think was a kind of respect and have since started to wonder was something closer to convenience.

"You and Nathan good?" I asked her, an old reflex, checking on her the way I'd checked on her our whole lives.

"We're great." She said it fast, too fast, the way you answer a question you've already decided not to think about too hard. "He's a good man. Steady. It's boring, if I'm honest, but good." She grinned at me over her glass, daring me to disagree, and I didn't, because agreeing felt safer than examining why the word boring had come out of her mouth sounding almost like a complaint she wasn't ready to file yet.

She got up not long after that to check on Sofia, an excuse more than a necessity, and I sat alone on the porch finishing my wine, listening to the cicadas start their evening racket, and I remember thinking, with no particular alarm attached to it, that my sister had looked, for just a second there, like a woman circling something she hadn't decided whether to name. I didn't chase the thought. I finished my wine instead, and by the time she came back down, laughing about something Sofia had said in her sleep, I'd already let it go, filed under things I'd examine later, if ever, the way I filed most things that frightened me.

She stayed another hour after that, the two of us moving inside once the mosquitoes got aggressive, and she helped me fold a basket of Sofia's laundry, tiny socks and impossibly small shirts, and somewhere in the middle of it she got quiet in a way that wasn't like her at all.

"Do you ever think about what would've happened if you'd picked Nathan?" she asked, not looking up from the sock she was pairing.

The question landed strangely, coming from nowhere, and I remember laughing it off too quickly. "Where's that coming from?"

"I don't know. I just think about stuff like that sometimes. Whether people end up where they're supposed to or just where they happened to land." She finally looked up, and there was something unreadable in her face, gone as quickly as it arrived. "Forget it. I'm just being weird."

"You're always a little weird," I said, and she laughed, and threw a balled-up sock at me, and the strange moment passed the way most strange moments did between us — unexamined, folded away, filed under things we'd get to eventually, if ever