Heather Emmanuel
constructions
The leather jacket has a tear in it when she first meets Josie.
It’s an old thing, bought from a street vendor in Porto with loose change rather than a bank note. Weary, worn in, torn at a seam where her biceps have filled it out. Josie’s eyes form crescent moons when they meet hers across the bar. It’s a Monday; a choice, cheaper drinks, less of a crowd. Josie is in a mesh number that makes her breath hitch.
“If I didn’t know you, I’d say you’re brooding,” Josie says. There’s an affectionate lilt to it that makes her stumble as she stands to greet Josie, caramel scent seeping into her skin with the half hug they share. Josie gestures at her jacket.
She wears that jacket less and less over the years. She is surprised with a new one on her 30th. A brother-in-law — since divorced out of the family — sends her another before his move to Rotterdam. She treats herself to a burgundy one when a generous tax rebate comes through. They gather dust for a while — sticky hands, weaning. Their oldest chews on the handle of Josie’s bag and she folds all her leather jackets on the top of the wardrobe.
~
The kids climb her like scaffolding. One on her shoulders, one around her waist. The youngest, not quite standing yet, latches onto her shin. She doesn’t mind. Walks like it’s an everyday occurrence. At this point, it is.
“Dad!”
She doesn’t bristle. The oldest started it. Aware that toddlers say all sorts of things when their teeth and tongue learn where they belong. The first time their oldest said it, a new layer of warmth permeated her veins. Not a microaggression, not misgendering — just the uncomplicated logic of a one-year-old who sees strong arms and safe hands.
The adoption was uncharacteristically swift. Six months old, an emergency placement. The kind that comes with a binder of redacted notes, a warning about attachment issues, and an uncle: no contact.
Once, she finds their oldest standing in front of the television, arms crossed. Socks pulled up to the knees, gaze fixed on the talking animals with the same gravity she watches the evening news. Josie chuckles into her camomile.
“What?” She says.
“That’s you,” says Josie. Points at their child — arms folded like a bouncer, jaw set with quiet resolve. She sees it. The stance, the socks, the stillness. In the slight furrow of the brow when reading a picture book.
She gets their daughter’s name tattooed on her collarbone a month later. Black ink, serif font, middle name included.
~
She sleeps facing the door. Always has.
In ground floor flats with too thin walls and cheap locks, dishwashers out of order for months on end. Now in a house, semi-detached, with a driveway and wind chimes.
In between night shifts, she reads. Not fiction. More understanding than escape. Containing words like resilient and boundaries and inner child. Some parts are highlighted, others scrawled with notes in smudged ballpoint. The pages blur. From fatigue or wet eyes, she doesn’t try to know.
Count to ten.
Their middle child is the one who runs headfirst into a glass pane and bounces back laughing. Grass stained shorts, a scar on the knee. She wonders what it means to move through the world without caution, to scale the monkey bars knowing the drop might hurt and doing it anyway. Sometimes she flinches before they fall. It’s the only time she does, these days.
“Dad, watch this!” Their middle child swears she can do a handstand for five seconds this time, counts out loud as she does. Legs buckle, elbows thud. She’s up again before she’s fully hit the ground. “I’ll get to five next time. You saw, right? Did you see? Did you see it, Dad?”
“I saw,” she says, even, shielding her eyes from the sun.
She thinks of her books at the top of her wardrobe, stacked next to the leather jackets she hasn’t worn since bottles replaced bar tabs. Receipts used as bookmarks, a yellow sticky note in between pages about risk tolerance. Most chapters she rereads, some she does not. Some speak louder the second time, others etch into her mind and refuse to leave.
~
They’re married on November 3rd. The date isn’t sentimental; the venue was cheap, and they were offered a discount for booking three months out.
Josie insists on a naked cake, says the kids will lick all the frosting and it won’t be fair on her sister. That same sister calls them newlyweds and makes a speech about fresh starts; decade long relationship aside.
Under a canopy of fairy lights and wind-chimed breeze, Josie says I do with a gardenia tucked behind her left ear. They kiss before the officiant finishes the sentence.
She wraps her hands around Josie’s waist like they belong there. Josie, in a sleek dress that hugs her hips, dipping low between her shoulder blades like a soft exhale. Goosebumps decorate her arms like glitter.
Carrot cake is cut by five-year-old who announces that a butter knife is not a real knife, and a served by seven-year-old who holds the paper plate with the same reverence as the ring cushion.
Not a bride, not a groom. A wife, Josie’s wife. A dad, her daughter’s dad. In a tailored tuxedo that holds like a second skin, fashioned to fit her waist, not accentuate it. Josie tugs off her suit jacket before the first dance, then pulls her in by the tie for a kiss. She feels Josie sigh against her lips, cheers and chimes, steady bass beneath the floorboards of the rented room.
That night, she unwraps Josie's dress like a gift. Dark skin framed in white lace, cinnamon scented, warm. She kisses Josie like it’s the first time again: jawline, sternum, beneath the caesarean scar. Hands anchoring Josie’s hips, mouth curved when Josie melts into her. Stone and bloom, tenderness and trust, clothed certainty and fragile grace.
Her sports bra stays on. Pristine white, racerback for Josie’s nails to dig in exactly how they both like. She gives, always. It gnaws at her some days, how much and how often she wants to give herself away. Once, a weight of growing up too soon, being everything to everyone. Now, it’s her wife grinding on her flexed thigh and asking for more.
She has never been anyone’s to give. But she has always been there for someone to take.
~
Josie’s second pregnancy hits harder than the first. Nausea, and hospital bracelets. Hyperemesis gravidarum, in uppercase letters, stamped on the hospital file.
The staff call her sir. She doesn't blink at that, doesn't correct them. Her priority is the fact that her wife is on intravenous fluids, breathing like she's teaching herself how; in and out.
She is rubbing circles on Josie's back. Behind closed bay curtains, other women are retching, crying. Some on the phone with husbands who hopelessly pack a hospital bag, with younger children at home who don't understand that their baby sibling isn't quite here, yet.
At home, she spirals.
She searches and reads, checks out books from the health and maternity care sections. The numbers ambush her, jump out at her. Impress into her skin like branding.
She is called husband and partner more times than wife. Between the beeping monitors and antiseptic, a Josie's shallow breaths: “Wife. She is my wife.”
She anticipates. The way she would anticipate a fist, or a locked door, or a slur she wouldn't understand until a decade later. The moment it falls apart, when someone cloaked in dark blue says, sir, we are, sorry, but your partner—
Category One.
They wheel Josie out mid-sentence. Breech, they say, barking orders at each other. Blurred lights, the middle of the night. Her mind is on Josie, on their children obliviously showing Josie drawings through the phone screen. On them, who told her she will never have this, who made her believe every flash of happiness was temporary while the bruises were constant.
“Say hi.”
Josie's rasp is light. Dark skin dotted with gleams of sweat. Crescent moon eyes, smile crooked, herself.
She doesn't cry. Urges herself not to. Not here, not when Josie needs her, not when Josie could have–
“She has your eyes,” says Josie, a space between heartbeats.
Their daughter is curled up on Josie's chest, a bundle of cotton and newness, mouth rooting.
She thinks: thank you.
She thinks: you'll never know how much I’ll give you.
She thinks of every moment that led here, the leather jackets folded on the wardrobe, the bruises that faded slower than they should have, the first time Josie kissed her outside the bar on her tiptoes.
Numbers terrify her.
“Eight one. That's you,” Josie says, dry. “She’s all you.”
Her thumb finds their baby's spine, traces plump skin. Fragile, real, hospital hat half-off.
“I hope she gets everything else from you,” she says. Kisses Josie's cheek, and means it more than she's meant anything else.
~
The warehouse runs on systems. Home runs on chaos. Thankfully, she is good at both.
She loves the feel of her steel toe boots hitting the floor. Her body has a purpose here: calloused hands, an aching back. Josie packs marshmallow scented hand cream in the glove compartment. Factory hours, forklifts and steel shelves. There is no glamour, no cubicles or after work drinks. But there is a paycheck and a rhythm and the bone deep satisfaction of bringing something home.
Josie greets her every time with a kiss on the cheek. Sometimes glossed, mostly not. Hey, handsome, into the corner of her mouth. Her neck if the kids aren't around. Josie, her wife, in a faded t-shirt and mismatched socks, braids rolled into a lopsided bun.
Her shoulders twinge. Not of pain, not exhaustion. Proof that her body works. Provides. In a sense, it could be seen as patriarchal. In her mind, it's a tree offering shade.
She used to hide when she heard tyres on gravel, holding back coughs of inhaled dust bunnies under the bed. Keys in the door meant tightened shoulders, shut windows.
These days, years later, she barely kicks off her boots before little limbs fly towards her. Arms around her waist, her leg. They call her Dad, always Dad. With all the certainty of small humans untouched by expectation. With no other word for safety and solace, no fear in their voices. She crouches to scoop them up and they cling, babbling, verbs and nouns tumbling out of them.
“Dad, I got a gold sticker in school today!”
“Dad, I made a paper aeroplane all by myself!”
“Wow, do I get to see them?”
“Dada, jam!”
She lifts them with ease, like weights she's trained her whole life to carry.
The house smells of banana bread, paint and the linen diffuser. The floor is littered with socks and puzzle pieces. Josie says something about their youngest discovering the wonder of eating jam straight from the jar with a dessert spoon. The oldest two ramble over each other about correcting a teacher who didn't say Dad.
She used to think dad meant taking punches without crying. Stone faced, jaw clenched, being harder than whatever hit her.
She knows now: it's kissing tears off round cheeks. Dabbing bloody knees with a cold cloth, offering a choice of plasters. It's tying shoe laces, holding kids on her broad shoulders, ignoring hushed giggles behind the curtain during hide and seek. It's pressing a kiss into her wife's neck and saying, I got it. Whether it's unloading the dishwasher, or surprising Josie with a new dress and a date.
The joy of being loved like this catches her off guard sometimes. Her body remains strong, sweat beading on her forehead as she moves freight, sorts pallets, lifts boxes twice her weight.
Steel presses in her thighs on the mezzanine and when she pulls out her phone, there's a string of photos from Josie and the kids. Grinning, laughing, on a patterned blanket in the park. There are sandwiches and grapes and melted ice cream and she thinks to herself, I made that possible. Josie says the same thing, unbidden, when they install a swing set into the backyard on a cloudless June afternoon.
She never thought she would live this long. Not out of misery, but from inevitability. Days blur into weeks then months. Years pass, and she turns forty with short hair and shorter nails. Their middle child is a specialist in candid shots.
A leather jacket is draped over her shoulders. By Josie, of course. This one is new, newer. Jet black, label attached and the price evidently scribbled out. She looks up, and Josie is there. In a dark green dress, ombre braids cascading down her back. Those eyes, the crescent moon eyes when Josie smiles, still makes her breath hitch.
“It’s been a while,” Josie says. And means it, too. Josie leans down for a kiss she is happy to give and the camera clicks, flashes. The perfect shot. Their oldest rolls her eyes. Their youngest wants the candles blown out already.
The other jackets stay folded in the wardrobe. So do her healing books, the earrings. Not relics, but fragments. Some are faded, creased, seams stretched beyond repair. Softened by edges yet holding its form. Here, the leather creases as she moves – soft, worn. Real.
Heather Emmanuel is a writer of contemporary lesbian literary fiction and prose poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Offing, SWWIM, Maudlin House and Gone Lawn. You can find her at heather-emmanuel.com or at @heather.emmanuel8
