What Serena doesn't know

NADINE There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive with tears or empty beds or the hollow echo of a house too quiet. It arrives on a Tuesday morning when the coffee is hot and the light through the kitchen window is doing that golden thing it does in July, and that's when you realize you are… … perfectly content and perfectly alone. And that somewhere along the way you made peace with both. I was thirty-nine years old, and I had made peace with both. "Mom, have you seen my white sneakers?" Rhea's voice came from somewhere upstairs, preceded by the thunder of her feet across the hallway ceiling. I smiled into my mug. "Where you left them!" I called back. "That's not helpful!" "It wasn't meant to be!" A dramatic groan. Then silence. Then the thunder again, moving in the opposite direction. I stood at the kitchen counter in my old university T-shirt and cotton shorts, hair wrapped in a headscarf I kept forgetting to replace, watching the garden through the window. The hydrangeas needed water. The fence still had that loose panel Rhea kept promising to fix and never did. Lazy thing. The morning was still doing what mornings in late June do, warming slowly, unhurried, like it had nowhere to be. I had nowhere to be either. This was the summer. Long and open and unscheduled. Rhea had finished her second year and come home trailing laundry and loud music and an energy that filled the house in ways I hadn't realized I missed. I had taken a lighter consulting load deliberately. Serena had been saying for months ‘Nadine, rest, you work like someone is chasing you’ and for once I had listened. Serena. I heard my phone buzz on the counter before I even reached for it. Think of the devil… Good morning bestie. He lands today. I laughed softly and typed back. I know. You've told me eleven times. Three dots. Then: TWELVE. And I'm allowed. My baby is coming home. I set the phone down still smiling. Serena had been counting down Avery's return for the better part of three months. Every phone call in the last week had started the same way… … Only six more days. … Only four more days. …Two. …One. Nadine, he sounded so tired on the phone, do you think he's eating? I had listened to every version with the patience that twenty-two years of friendship builds in a person. Twenty-two years. Trust me when I say Avery was the best thing that happened to her because damn… Serena was obsessed with her child. And I'm happy for her. We met at the antenatal clinic. Two women, both visibly pregnant, both visibly alone, sitting in plastic chairs across from each other in a waiting room that smelled of antiseptic and overhead fluorescent lighting. Serena had looked at me. I had looked at her. And she had said, with the particular boldness that I would later understand, was simply Serena. "First one?" "Yes," I'd said. "Me too. You look terrified." "You don't," I'd told her. She'd shrugged one shoulder. "I decided scared wasn't going to help the baby." I had thought about that for years afterward. The quiet pragmatism of it. The way she had simply chosen not to be afraid and then wasn't. I had never been able to do that. I felt everything fully, held it, turned it over, examined it from all sides before I could set it down. Serena moved through life like it owed her a good time and was simply late delivering. We were opposites in almost every measurable way. We had been inseparable ever since. "The fathers," as we had taken to calling them in the years following their respective disappearances, were a topic we had long since retired. Rhea's father had been a man I loved genuinely and badly at twenty-two, the kind of love that is more feeling than foundation. When I fell pregnant he had looked at me with something that was almost an apology, and then he had gone. Serena's story was different and sharper and hers to tell, but the shape of it was the same. Two women, two babies, no men. We had raised them together in the loose, overlapping way that close friends do, school runs covered for each other, dinners shared across each other's tables, birthdays that blended into one long extended family celebration with no blood requirement for entry. And somewhere in the comfortable middle of all that over wine and laughter and the specific delirium of raising children alone, Serena had first said it. Her mind. "Wouldn't it be something? Avery and Rhea." “What!” I laughed. They were nine and eight respectively. She had smiled into her glass. "Girl, I'm just saying." And she kept just saying it, lightly, fondly, the way you carry a pleasant daydream without really believing it until it became a running joke between us, then a warm fixture, then something neither of us examined too closely because it was simply nice to imagine. Two families becoming one. The friendship sealed into something permanent and blood-deep. It was a beautiful thought. I watered the hydrangeas that morning. I replied to two emails. I reminded Rhea to eat breakfast before she disappeared into the day. I did all the ordinary things that ordinary Tuesday mornings require. I had no way of knowing it was the last ordinary morning I would have for a very long time. And I mean it. SERENA He was twenty minutes late coming through arrivals and I aged a full year for every one of them. I stood at the barrier with my sign. Yes. I made a sign because why not. I am his mother. I watched the doors open and close and open again, and every broad-shouldered stranger who wasn't my son felt like a small personal insult. And then the doors opened and he was there. Taller, somehow. I know that isn't possible at twenty-six, but the army does something to a man's posture that makes him take up space differently, like he had been taught that the ground beneath his feet was worth standing on. He was scanning the arrivals' hall with those calm, unhurried eyes he'd had since childhood, the ones that always made me feel like he was older than me, even when he was seven. Then he found me and the calm cracked open into something younger, something mine. "Mom." I didn't say anything. I just held him. Hugged him tightly like he was the only being in the world. He let me. He even held back, which he would never have admitted to anyone. "You made a sign," he said into my shoulder. "I made a sign." "Mom." "Avery." He laughed. It was a low sound, a little rusty, like it hadn't been used enough lately. I filed that away quietly, the way mothers file things, in the part of myself that worries and watches and never fully stops. In the car I talked because I always talk, and he listened because he always listens and somewhere between the airport and the highway I said it before I had even decided to. "Nadine's Rhea is home for the summer." He glanced at me briefly. "Yeah?" "She's grown into the most beautiful girl, Avery. Warm, smart, finishing her degree…" "Mom." "I'm just saying." He looked back at the road ahead. The ghost of a smile. "You've always been just saying." "And I've always been right." He didn't answer that. But he didn't argue either, which with Avery has always meant the same thing. I watched his profile against the moving window while turning on a song and felt the particular happiness of having your person back within reach whole, breathing, home. I thought this was going to be a good summer. And I believed it completely.