“Invasion”

In the last weeks of her pregnancy, Leya developed a headache that started behind her left eye, radiated vertically over her skull and down the back of her head into her neck.

When she said the headache was keeping her up even more than the ache in her hips and the baby pressing hard against her bladder, her doctor blamed hormones or stress, and joked that she’d better get used to not sleeping at night.

Leya spent her first day away from her job lying on the sofa, watching Sex and the City reruns. She had started her parental leave unexpectedly early because of the headache, and also because she could hardly wait to begin a full year off, away from her work at the NGO: the office politics, the weight of working on projects that sounded meaningful that never seemed to really change anything. Over time she found herself spending her days filling out applications for funding, having long meetings with the other staff and potential supporters, always raising money. The real work, the kind that connected them to others outside their organization, was then assigned to volunteers. After a while it felt pointless.

Soon after the pain in her head began, she also started finding ants in her house. The first one, a black speck small as a splinter, wandered across the bathroom counter as she was braiding her hair. Out of the corner of her eye Leya saw it move and thought that the headache was distorting her vision.

But when the insect passed behind the faucet, she dropped her hair, squashed the ant with her thumb, then rinsed it down the sink. The baby in her belly shifted.

From the kitchen, the phone rang. It was Nathan, calling from his office.

“I booked us a few days away. Before the baby. Everyone at work thinks it’s a good idea.”

“When?”

“This week. I’ll take care of everything.”

Leya felt that she should say that there was so much left to complete at home, but she felt a weariness come over her, making the words feel like too much effort. Nathan was the kind of guy who got things done. When they needed a fence built he organized a group of friends to come over on a Saturday, ordered pizza, rented equipment and filled a cooler with beer ahead of time. They had the whole thing constructed in a day. Just last month he’d re-painted the entire living room in a single afternoon.

But every time he brought up the baby, saying he liked a certain name, or so-and-so had a rocking chair they were giving away, Leya could only say, “Not yet, I’m not ready,” and he would look at her with worried eyes and exhale.

“Okay. Tell me when.”

She still had the feeling of the baby not quite being real. As though if she really acknowledged that they were about to fit a new human into their house, she might jinx the whole thing, cause something to go terribly wrong. She had continued, throughout the entire pregnancy, to be surprised when people noticed her growing belly, asked her how far along she was. It felt as if the pregnancy were still private, happening only between her and her own body, and she could hardly imagine there being an actual person, a combination of herself and Nathan, a complete human that she was about to bring into the world and share with others.

Pregnant, she felt awkward and embarrassed, unused to herself. Nathan, unlike Leya, moved with ease through the world, in his life before her and now, with her. Leya could feel his concern over her lack of desire to plan and prepare, and yet she could hardly participate, not even to ease his worry.

With the phone pressed to her ear, she considered that planning a weekend trip was Nathan’s way of taking action, feeling productive somehow. She pictured him calling from his grey cubicle, talking in a low tone so the others around him couldn’t hear, even though he talked through the idea with them first. So she said, “Sure, it’ll be great.” Pressing the hang-up button, Leya felt her headache shift from behind her left eye into the bridge of her nose. She rubbed it between her index finger and thumb.

Over the next two hours, she discovered three more ants. After killing each one, she thought that she should have found a piece of paper and taken each little thing outside, but instead she found herself squashing all three, instinctively, as she had the first. She rolled out the vacuum and sucked up the tiny carcasses with the open end of the grey hose, and then took a nap on the sofa in the afternoon sunshine. Sleeping dreamlessly through the baby’s hiccups and kicks, curled around her own belly like a cat.

*

It was late afternoon when they made their way in their blue Subaru to the resort in the mountains. The hotel sprawled luxuriously, stoically, as though it had always been there, rising from the grey rock and green forest like magic, like in a fairy tale.

They spent three nights at the hotel, sipping lemonade near the windows in the lounge, looking out at the pale blue lake and the sharp grey peaks that surrounded it, eating heavy meals they could barely afford and Leya couldn’t finish, the food kicked back up into her throat by the baby’s busy feet.

As a child, when Leya had regularly come to this same hotel for her father’s annual conferences, her family was often the only dark-skinned one and the hotel seemed sparsely visited, the lobby quiet and often empty. She felt embarrassed then, especially of her parents who didn’t notice how they stood out, though they were regularly asked where they came from. These days the hotel was busier, especially in the summertime, with wealthy tourists from all over the world. No one cared about her and Nathan or their mismatched skin tones. Much of the staff was from countries in Asia or Africa, their rolling accents warm in her ears.

The couple didn’t go out hiking or stay up late huddled close together under the night sky, appreciating the quiet away from the city as they would have in the past. Instead they spent evenings and mornings in their cramped room, watching old movies, pressing the mute button through the ads. Leya and Nathan caught glimpses of the late summer sunset through the window and turned off the bedside lamps before eleven. The headache shifted again, this time circling both Leya’s left and right eyes, as though she were wearing goggles.

On the drive home they both kept their windows cracked so that the air whistled around them and it was hard to hear each other. The road was familiar and the drive easy in the summertime. Nathan drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on Leya’s knee. She tried to keep it very still, lest he see her movement as a kind of rejection. She considered asking him what he was thinking about, but instead looked out toward the shimmering mirage that the sunlight made on the smooth road in front of them, the shadows of dark green forest on either side.

*

When they got home, Leya slid her silver key into the lock and opened the door. She kicked off her black flip-flops and beelined for the bathroom, then back to the kitchen for a drink. Over the rushing sound from the tap she heard the front door squeak shut, the thunk as Nathan dropped their bags on the floor.

“Nate, we have ants.”

She had started pouring a glass of water, which was overflowing into the enamel sink. Nathan reached around her to turn off the faucet and looked over to the countertop, where Leya was watching several bugs hurry away from her shadow in different directions. He looked down and saw another on the floor. He squished the ant with the toe of his sneaker, then pulled a tissue from the box on the counter and wiped the dead insect off his shoe. He folded the soft paper in half and used the other side to dab away the ones on the counter. Leya dumped the contents of the over-full glass down the drain without drinking it.

The ants were all over the kitchen. As if sensing the house had been left untended, they had invaded. Nathan got the vacuum out and went around sucking them off the countertops and floors, without killing them first. Leya, on her hands and knees, washed the floors with a mixture of soapy water and vinegar, the best way, according to the internet, to wash away all traces of scent that each ant left for the next one. The acrid smell made her gag; her belly hung so low that it nearly touched the floor.

They threw out the rice and a nearly full bag of flour. When he opened the white plastic bucket of honey that they kept on the bottom shelf of the open pantry, Nathan saw it was nearly black with the insects, as though someone had spilled a bag of ground pepper into gold. The lid had been left open a crack, wasn’t sealed all the way around, and so the hungry ants had, one by one, made their way toward it, then into it. Stuck and engorged, they were unable to bring the sweet treasure back to their queen. Nathan slammed the lid down hard and took the bucket out to the trash, trapping the live ants inside.

They stayed up late that night, washing and vacuuming. Leya wondered again if they were ready for parenthood.

*

Stepping out of the shower the next day, Nathan at work and the house quiet, Leya looked down at the expanding white lightning bolts stretching across her brown skin and reached for the coconut oil. Rubbing it into her belly she hummed a tune that her mother also used to sing to her. She wasn’t sure the baby could even hear her voice over the internal clanging of her body. A memory came to her then, sharp as worry, of her mother’s childhood home in the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa. The last time they’d visited was when Leya was a teenager, before her grandparents died and the rest of the family moved away, evacuating, as most of the South Asians did at that time, and transferring their money to more stable British banks. They left in a single generation, as they had arrived, only decades before.

Leya’s family had moved from India to East Africa, then on to England, the US or Canada, her home. Clusters of the family followed each other. She used to think they were travellers, adventurers, but wonders now if they were, in fact, only opportunists, moving for jobs and money, setting down roots that reached scarcely below the surface but no deeper, driven by a need more basic than adventure, and always loyal to the sprawling British empire, to a belief in that crumbling hierarchy.

When she was a child, Leya and her two brothers argued all the time, but on those long overseas vacations when they visited the family still in Kenya, they became allies, sleeping in the same row of narrow beds their mom once slept in beside her sisters. As teenagers, they talked about things they missed. The siblings complained.

“I just wish we could be home for a normal Christmas, with a tree and stockings, even the Santa stuff.”

“Marlow invited me to go skiing with him and his family for a whole weekend. I could be nice and cool on the hill right now instead of dying in this heat.”

“Who cares about skiing? I just want to go home and play regular video games. I can’t believe we have all these relatives here and none of them even have a Nintendo. And the TV sucks.”

“Isn’t it weird that Indian people actually eat Indian food all the time? Don’t they ever get sick of it? I’d do pretty much anything for a pizza.”

The siblings spent afternoons sprawled on their grandparents’ ornate wooden furniture watching an old fan agitate the heavy heat around them. In the evenings they visited one relative or another, crowded into small cars with the windows closed despite the heat, down potholed streets dotted with palms, the road busy with honking cars, pedestrians. At relatives’ houses they watched TV with groups of cousins, ate elaborately spiced meals that were consistent, if not identical, at each house. The kind of food Leya craved now.

Leya got dressed and called her mom on speaker. “Oh good, you’re home. I’m coming over.”

*

Leya’s parents lived in the same house in the suburbs that they had bought when Leya was only four. It was comfortably similar to the others in their cul-de-sac, all with pale shades of vinyl siding that had faded over the years, though the lawns were still neatly trimmed, the trees pruned.

Inside, the house was clean and dated, living room walls lined not with purchased art, but with photos of the family through the years. Leya and her brothers on a beach, laughing. The family in front of an artificial wooden bookcase filled with fake books in a studio photo, school pictures. Leya alone, wearing a sari and elaborate yellow-gold earrings, heavy black eyeliner. Down the hallway and along the stairway to the basement were pictures that she and her brothers had drawn as children, yellow suns and red flowers, green strips along the bottom for grass. They were set in plain frames and dusted every two weeks.

As she let herself in, her mother greeted her with a call from the kitchen. “I’m here! Come in.” Her mom was at the sink. She dried her hands on a dishcloth before pressing them on either side of Leya’s belly, then rubbed her daughter’s shoulders. “I’ll make tea.”

Sitting at the same spot at the dining room table where she had sat as a child, her spot, Leya told her mom, “While we were away the house got infested, hundreds of ants, all after a bucket of honey we didn’t close all the way. It could have been worse, at least they aren’t really big bugs, cockroaches or anything, but still, it was disgusting. We cleaned and cleaned, but we’re keeping the traps out, in case. In case they come back.”

Was she testing her mom, she wondered as she was talking, expecting her to also wonder if Leya was really ready for motherhood?

Leya’s mom faced the window, in the same spot she, too, had always sat. Her face, Leya noticed in the bright light, had aged around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was still dyed brownish black, no grey showing. She laced her fingers on the flowered tablecloth and listened to her daughter without fidgeting.

As Leya finished telling her about the ants, her mom said, “Do you want to come and stay here?”

Leya considered temporarily moving into the room that used to be hers but that now contained only a narrow desk with a desktop computer and a printer, a double bed with a department store comforter on it. She imagined crawling into the bed and sleeping for hours, letting her mom cook for her. She rubbed at the headache, now lodged between her eyebrows, took a sip of her sweet, milky tea, and contemplated staying, if only for a nap.

Thinking of how easy it would be to linger, to never leave, and the impossibility of it she said, “I’d better go home.”

*

The mid-afternoon drive back to the inner city took about half an hour. There were only a few other cars on the street at this time, though the cafés and restaurants she passed were busy. Paused at a red light, Leya looked up at the white lines of contrails criss-crossing the blue sky. Her head felt as though she were wearing a too-small helmet. Her arms reached far for the steering wheel, like two narrow bridges over her round middle. A song she remembered from high school came on the radio. A slow dance that Nathan might sway and sing along to, as a joke. She might have smiled if he were there.

At home, Leya kept her flip-flops on, in case there were still some ants left. She washed her hands and pulled a glass jar of dry red lentils from the cupboard. The house was quiet; squares of sunshine from the windows patterned the floor.

She pulled an enamel pot from a shelf and put it on the stove, added a glug of oil, found an onion, and cut it into narrow strips on a wooden board. The onion made her eyes water, and she felt the pressure in her head loosen, as though someone had pulled upward on the top of her skull and then let go. She added the slices of onion to the pot. As they browned, she chopped a carrot, took spices from a rack and added them without measuring to the sizzling mixture. The carrots, the lentils, water from the kettle, a bit of salt. What else? There was a bag of wilting spinach in the fridge, and she added that too, altering her mother’s recipe but only a little. She hummed to herself again and to the baby as she worked, stirring until the lentils were soft and fat.

She tore a piece of paper from a pad she found in the junk drawer and scribbled on it with plastic pens until she found one that worked well, then set the paper and pen down on the table. She got a clean bowl from the dishwasher and filled it from the steaming pot on the stove, pulled a single spoon from the cutlery drawer.

As she put the bowl of soup down and eased into the chair in front of it, she looked out toward her compact backyard, crowded with the green of summertime. Kicking off her flip-flops at last, Leya then stretched her arms upward, rotated her neck in a slow circle, one way then the other. She ate a spoonful from her bowl. Then picked up the pen and titled a list in blue ink: “Things a Baby Needs.”

An erratic mosquito bashed against the screen door in front of her, attempting escape. Down the street, a humming lawnmower coughed and sputtered to a stop; a bike bell rang four times. The baby’s foot pushed into her ribcage. With the pen still poised in her hand, Leya used her elbow to push down on her belly, until the pressing weight eased, and so became tolerable again.