I couldn’t argue with him. Guilt sprouted in my belly. But what would he have done?
“And after that?” he wondered.
“She came home eventually. We lived with my grandmother, holed up in the attic for about six months while she grew and got healthy. It was all right. Nonna fed me a lot and sometimes got up with me when she woke in the night. My sisters watched her sometimes so I could sleep. But it was clear I wasn’t going back to school or anywhere else for a long time. And so mostly it was just…us.”
It was hard not to tear up at those memories. Matthew had worked tirelessly to convert the old attic into a room where Sofia and I could convalesce apart from everyone else, hanging drywall, painting the subfloor and covering it with old rugs, laying a huge king mattress directly on the ground so we could sleep together safely since she hated the crib. Sometimes I had felt a little like Rapunzel, locked in a tower—especially when Sofia had colic. But mostly it was a safe space. A place I felt loved. A place where I could figure out what would happen next.
“When she was six months old, that’s when I applied to teach. I knew I couldn’t go afford to go back to graduate school on my own. Not with a premature newborn, and not as a master’s student without funding. And New York City schools have this program where you finish your degree while you work because they need staff so badly. And so, when I got the job in Carroll Gardens, Mattie—that’s my brother—got an apartment for the three of us. And then his house in Red Hook, where we live now. I got my master’s—in teaching, not English. But still, it’s something. And Sofia gets a home and a family.”
Xavier was quiet for a long time, digesting my story. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, especially with his unreadable, stony expression.
“You never thought of…”
I turned at the corner of Court and Union, outside an Italian restaurant named after Marco Polo. “Of what?”
Xavier looked queasy, like he didn’t want to say it. Immediately I knew.
“Oh,” I said. “Of getting rid of her, you mean?”
He nodded slowly.
I shrugged. “Well, no. I didn’t, to be honest. I mean, I could have. But…no.”
It was hard to explain. Yes, we were Catholic. So, nominally, we didn’t believe in abortion—though to be honest, I didn’t know anyone, my family members or otherwise, who weren’t pro-choice. This was New York, after all. And I could also understand fully—maybe even more now than before I had Sofia—why a woman would choose not to sacrifice her own body, life, and essential wellbeing for a pregnancy. Motherhood was unbelievably difficult, and I was only four years into it. I loved my daughter more than my own life, but raising her was the hardest thing I would ever do.
The truth was, at any other time, with any another man, if I’d gotten pregnant by literally anyone else…yes, I would have done it just to save my own life and protect my future. Even then, sitting in the bathroom, staring at that damn test, the thought flickered through my mind quicker than lightning. But it was expelled just as fast.
Because she was his. Maybe Xavier had never felt that way, but at the time, I believed he loved me like I loved him. An all-encompassing, life-consuming, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love that I might never see again but had been blessed to find in the first place. Yes, he’d broken my heart, but even then, what we had felt sacrosanct. And in Sofia, something of that love had survived.
But how do you tell someone who doesn’t believe in love that that is exactly what saved his child?
“I loved her,” I said simply. “Even then. Even before she was hardly…anything. I loved her. And I wanted her. And so that was my choice.”
“Even though it cost you so much? School, career, independence. I don’t suppose most twenty-seven-year-olds in this city are more worried about changing nappies than nightclub entry.”
Again, I shrugged, then crossed the street without answering, Xavier close behind. At this point, there was no use worrying about what might have been. This was my life now. You couldn’t go back.
As we passed a bookstore, I stopped and gazed inside at the shelves and shelves of beauties. My first loves, really.
“I used to take Sofia here when she was a baby,” I said. “They had a story hour. She had no idea what was going on, really, but it was a reason to get out of the house. And it was a place where, I don’t know…I guess it was a place where I still felt like myself.”
He looked hard through the window like it would reveal something important to him. I was tempted to go in, but my watch informed me I had maybe twenty minutes before I had to pick up Sofia. Then, poof, back to pumpkin land. I’d have to save the red wine for home.
“Who knows about me?” Xavier asked as I turned down a quieter street toward Cobble Hill.
I glanced at him, then back toward the beautiful brownstones that lined this particular street. So quintessentially Brooklyn.
“My family,” I admitted. “Meaning, my grandmother, my sisters, and my brother.”
“But not Sofia?”
I shook my head. “No. We all agreed it would be better to wait until she was old enough to handle it.”
“Handle what?”
I shot him a glance. “Do I really need to explain it again?”
Something like guilt crossed his fine features. “No, I don’t suppose you do. So, your family hates me, then?”