NELLE 9 | 2026
Excerpt
I slip into the water and shit is it ever cold. The pool is usually comfortable, unless Jean is leading the class, then it’s like a hot tub because she thinks the more we sweat the more calories we burn. I grow even colder when Emily walks to the side of the pool where she stands when she leads our class. Emily who’s just finished her third year in kinesiology. Whose limbs are longer than a giraffe’s neck. Whose skin looks like she’s just lathered cocoa butter all over it. Not like my pockmarked thighs.
Fuck.
“Luísa!” My cousin Connie spins her seven-month pregnant belly around, and crap, I must’ve said that out loud.
“What?” I ask loudly to block all the fucks echoing off the glass walls. “It’s freaking freezing in this pool. I signed up for aquafit, not a polar plunge.”
“I think it’s perfect in here.” Connie’s half floating on her back, her belly rising from the water like Mount Etna, that always-erupting Italian volcano.
“You would,” I say as Emily fiddles with her phone and Lorde’s “Royals” thumps through the wireless speakers.
Connie is pregnant with her second child. During warm up she tells me this is her last. When I ask her what that means— is she getting her tubes tied? Is Jeremy getting snipped?—she brushes me off and says the details don’t matter. What matters, she says, is that she’s decided. Hearing her say that—so easy, so free—makes the water feel five degrees colder.
We are like sisters, Connie and me. A month apart, the only children in our respective families until Connie’s parents had surprise twins when she was six. Having siblings is the first thing Connie did without me, and she’s never looked back. I try not to blame her, but it’s hard not to feel left behind even now as Connie’s belly surfaces from the water like a rising phoenix.
My son Carlos is eight. When I look at Carlos with his hair like frothy sawdust spume, I think about being a new mom again: the sleepless nights, the constant crying, the neverending laundry, the dirty bottles and mastitis, the stretch marks that all the vitamin E in the world couldn’t fix despite the latenight commercials preying on a new mother’s insecurity, and damn, I think, I’d do it all again in a second. But these things are not always up to us.
Fifteen years ago, I thought I’d be popping out babies so fast, Graham and I would have to upgrade our six-bedroom house on Chestnut Park. But back then ten percent of women my age had trouble getting and staying pregnant—a statistic I looked up once to make myself feel better. Graham always said he was happy with our little family. But every sound in our six-bedroom house echoed before I put up the grass cloth wallpaper. Graham won’t sell the place. He grew up there so asking him to move is like asking him to fly coach—neither is ever going to happen. I make the best of the six bedrooms. One is a home office, one a home gym, another a guest room, then there’s our large suite and Carlos’ room. There’s still one room that’s empty, that has a window that was long ago painted shut that Graham and I tried to pry open with a butter knife, but couldn’t, that Graham said we could replace if we ever had to, with walls covered in white wallpaper with black-printed elephants that in one corner look like they’re melting because of a small roof leak where the flashing pulled away from the chimney that’s now been patched, or so Graham tells me. But none of the duct work leads there, so I keep the door closed so it doesn’t suck up the heat from the rest of the place.