Remy
REMY
I t’s a dark and stormy night (well, it’s raining) and Mum’s back from a weekend away with Eric. We decide to settle down in the living room and watch a film.
“Mum?”
With her legs draped over my lap, she answers, “Yes, baby?”
“Why did you choose to have me?”
“I thought I was ready.”
I sit up. “Thought?”
She smiles sadly and pauses the film. “I would say I didn’t become your mother until you were two years old.”
I blink at her while she reaches over to play with my hair.
“When I decided to have you,” she says, “I was so sure I was ready; I felt it in my gut—now was the time. I didn’t waver once… until you arrived. Then something changed.”
Mum gets up and reaches for the very photo album Simone went through, before rejoining me on the sofa.
“I’m so grateful to your grandparents because I don’t know what I would have done without them,” she says.
“I thought I could do it alone; other mums do.” She shakes her head, turning the page to another photo.
Mum has me strapped to her back with kente cloth while she does the dishes, but when Grandma took the candid shot, Mum happened to look up and out of the window.
Even from just a side profile, you can see the wistful look in her eye.
“You can read all the books and watch all the videos,” Mum continues, “but nothing prepares you for that moment when you leave the hospital a single mother, and it’s entirely up to you now. ”
“What happened after?” I ask.
“I was diagnosed with postpartum depression.”
Mum turns to a photo of herself fast asleep. What had seemed like such an innocent picture now exposes so much more. Her unkempt hair, the stained clothes, the dry tear streak on her cheek, and the crease between her eyebrows. Even in sleep, she looks troubled. How did I not notice that before?
“Now that part was really something,” Mum says, “because I genuinely believed you only got postpartum if you were miserable about your baby. No, no. It’s luck of the draw.
I could have had the best pregnancy, the easiest delivery, and the most hopeful thoughts of the future, and that postpartum bitch still would have found me.
It was overwhelming to discover that I could have such little control over the one thing I had taken my time to choose. ”
“How did you get better?”
“You turned two.” She softly pinches my chin.
“It’s not even as if you were a loud, fussy baby that cried throughout the night, and then you were suddenly the opposite on your second birthday.
If anything, you added meaning to the phrase Terrible Twos!
” Mum laughs. “I just got better; the medication was starting to settle. I didn’t wake up that day and decide, it was a slow growth that I didn’t notice happening.
I only say when you turned two because it was during your second birthday party…
” Mum turns the page and reveals the photo of two-year-old me, covered in cake, with my grandparents and mum behind me.
The closer I look, and with what Mum has just revealed, the image almost morphs into something else.
It’s funny how something as static and unmoving as a photo can change with perspective.
This has always been a snapshot of my mum smiling, but now I can see how relaxed she is, and the haze of consternation in her eyes as she watches me.
“I just remember looking at you while this picture was being taken and thinking, This is it. I’m back.
I’ve got this. ” Mum smiles again. “I never once stopped loving you, that was never the issue, but the revelation on your birthday that I was doing better, was doing well and enjoying it was the perfect push. I dived in, found my way of mothering, and, I don’t like to brag unless someone is telling me not to, but I think I did a fantastic job.
” She cradles my face and gently squashes my cheeks.
“Well, we did a fantastic job.” Mum turns the page to a photo of my grandparents and sighs softly.
“For some of us it’s instant. For others, motherhood takes a while. ”
Mum reaches over to put her arm across my shoulders, pulling me into her chest and resting her chin on the top of my head.
“Remy?” she asks gently.
“Yes, Mum?”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
I don’t even hesitate. “I really messed up.”
“You’re pregnant?” Mum asks calmly. I nod and she nods in return. “Guess what? So am I!”
I launch up from my seat. “You’re what ?”
“Just kidding,” she says, pulling me back into her lap, and I fall into her, laughing. “Anyway,” she says, “talk to me.”
I tell her everything I told Lin the day we had brunch in Amsterdam. Afterward, we sit in silence as I listen to the steady beat of my mum’s heart.
“Since neither side is entirely clear to you at the moment,” she says, “would you consider adoption?”
“Adoption?” I repeat. “Going through with the pregnancy and then…”
“Gifting your baby to a couple,” Mum finishes. “You could choose the perfect one—maybe they’d even be open to possible future reconnection. Should the child want to find you, they can.”
All I manage to say is, “Oh.”
It’s strange to think I never considered adoption; to have a baby but then not keep it failed to register as a choice I had.
There’s still so much to consider. How would I feel knowing my child is out there somewhere?
How would I feel if my child grew up disinterested in finding me?
What if they do want to find me just to ask how I could possibly have given them up?
How will I answer that question? In a world full of single mums, would-do-anything-for-you mums, it-wasn’t-even-a-question mums, how can I look them in the eye and say: I just didn’t think I was ready?
With adoption comes the knowledge that I might have to somehow make peace with knowing my child could never forgive me.
“It’s worth adding to your options.” Mum cups my face in her hands again. “And you do have options.”
As we press our foreheads together, I think about how lucky I am to have a mother like mine. I think of Simone’s parents, and what their reaction would have been if Simone or Jenni had found themselves in my position, and I know it would be nothing as warm and as safe as this moment.
Then my phone rings from an unknown number.
“Hey,” a woman says, and her voice is shaking.
“Nova,” I say into the phone. “Is that you?”
“Yeah. Remy, are… are you busy? Can you come and get me? Please… bring a jacket if you can. It’s really cold out here.”
I jump out of my seat and begin looking for Mum’s car keys. “Nova, where are you? Whose phone is this?”
“I don’t know,” she says and her teeth are chattering. “I don’t have my phone but I asked this random girl if I could use hers and I have your number memorized. I’m in Spitalfields. If I text you the location, can you pick me up?”
I pull up to the location Nova sent thirty minutes ago and find her sitting on the steps outside a skincare shop. She has her head in her hands and I leave the car to sit beside her.
I drape the jacket I brought with me across her shoulders. “Hey, you.”
“Remy,” she says quietly, and when she lifts her head, there’s a dramatic difference between the Nova I know and love and the Nova sitting, dejected, on a step in Shoreditch.
When Nova loses weight, the fat in her cheeks is first to go, and that, combined with her diamond face shape, makes her look gaunt.
Her skin is duller than before, and her hair has been dragged to her nape with a claw clip. “I’m an idiot,” is all she says.
“I doubt that’s true but give it your best shot.”
Nova looks up at me and it’s obvious she’s been crying for hours. I immediately know it’s about David.
“He promised me,” she whispers.
“I know. What happened?”
Nova hugs her knees closer to her. “I was at his place,” she says. “I took a day off to surprise him for his birthday since he was meant to be at work all day. He walked in with another woman.”
“Oh, Nova. I’m so sorry.”
“I just ran out of there and left my bag with my keys, my phone, my fucking purse! You know what the worst thing is? I always said if he pulled that shit again, I’d never let him forget it.
I’d smash his TV, steal his watch—compensation, you know?
I’d shout at him until his neighbors came knocking…
but in the moment, I just stood there, holding a bunch of balloons.
I was just… you know in TFF when you wrote about shock and how your brain goes blank and everything leaves your body at the same time, and you start moving on autopilot?
That’s exactly what it was like. I didn’t even get a proper look at the girl. How am I gonna stalk her online now?”
“Well, you could always… not stalk her?”
“We both know that’s not possible.” Nova laughs against my shoulder until her smile fades. “Jackie loved David, you know,” she says quietly.
Before she passed away, we all saw Nova’s cousin Jackie as her very own Gandalf, wise and kind in equal measure, so I’m shocked to hear she was ever a fan of Nova’s very own Sauron.
“She loved David?” I repeat slowly.
Nova nods. “She didn’t know him like you girls did.
That’s my fault. At first, she saw what I wanted her to see, and so she thought we were great together.
Then, as things got more complicated, I only told her about the good parts of being with him.
He always knew how to act around people, how to convince them that he was this charming, great guy.
” She scoffs. “Fucking liar. She was disappointed when we broke up. So when Jackie died, I just thought, I don’t know, maybe she was right about him?
I mean, I never had to lie about the good parts.
And there were good parts. I thought I just needed to focus on those, but…
” Nova shakes her head. “He doesn’t love me.
Not like I want him to. And I can’t love him enough to make up for it. ”
I say nothing and pull Nova into an even tighter hug. “You smell the same,” she says after a while. “Like soap bubbles.”
I smile. “You’re acting like I’ve been away at war.”
She takes an appreciative breath in before pulling away. “If anyone’s been acting like they’ve been away, it’s…” Nova sheepishly dips her head. “It’s… you know.”
I take her hand and she squeezes mine.
“Eugh, I feel like shit,” Nova says, beginning to fan her eyes. “I had my eyelashes done this morning so I can’t be doing this right now. I just want to think about something else. Like you. What have you been up to?”
Her question catches me off guard. This is a question friends ask each other all the time, even if it’s only been hours since they last spoke.
I have always answered this question from my friends with “Not much,” before launching into a random tangent filled with stories of the average and expected.
This evening, I realize, I have been up to a lot that Nova knows nothing about.
I sigh deeply, and reflexively my hand goes to my stomach.
“Actually, I have something important to tell you.”
“Okay, wait a second,” Nova says, closing her eyes and holding out her hands as if to push back the disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You had a one-night stand with some guy called Ishir?”
“Yes.”
“Now you’re pregnant with his child?”
I nod.
“And you don’t know if you’re gonna keep it?”
“Right.”
Nova expels a huge pocket of air before a grin slowly spreads across her face. “You dark horse.”
“Nova!” But of course I can’t help but laugh with her; she has the most infectious laugh out of us all. “This is serious!”
“I know, but come on!” she says. “You’re the last one out of the group we’d put money on this happening to!” She reaches out to loop our arms together. “Jokes aside, you know you’re going to be fine, right?”
Just like that, the lightness that came with our laughter dissipates. “Am I?”
“Of course,” and Nova says this with the confidence of someone announcing two plus two equals four.
“You are… you’re Remy,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain what I mean, but I guess, it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to make a decision, you are going to make the right one for present-day-Remy and that’s all future-Remy has the right to ask for. Right?”
It’s simple but effective. “Right.”
We continue to sit on the shop’s front step together, looking out at the street for a while before we’re interrupted by the growl escaping Nova’s stomach.
“Remy?” she asks.
“Yeah, Nov?”
“I hate to move past such a beautiful moment but… did you bring any money?” she asks. “I’m starving, and I really want something deep-fried.”
“Remy, what the fuck?”
I return to the table Nova was saving us at Spitalfields Market with an assortment of containers, bags, and wrappings from four different places. When I asked what she wanted to eat, she looked so helpless I just left her with my phone to call her mum and went in search of food.
“I didn’t know what you wanted, but I wanted you to have something you liked so I got options.”
Nova sighs deeply and smiles. “I love you, man. I know I have a lot of groveling to do, but can I start on Monday?”
I smile back at her. “Monday, nine AM sharp. And I love you too, Nova, very much.”
“I know,” she says. “I can always tell.” Nova unwraps the food closest to her and adds, “If only you had a penis.”