GRAVIDA Stories a Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in Partial

GRAVIDA

Stories

A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

Katherine Rigney Trook

December 2012

Thesis written by Katherine Rigney Trook B.A., Davidson College, 2000 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2012

Approved by

____Varley O’Connor______, Advisor

____Robert Trogdon______, Chair, Department of English

____Timothy Chandler ______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………..iv

STORIES

The Birth Plan……………………………………………….…1

If You Learn the Fate of Freddy…………………..………..…22

Specimen………..……………………………………….….…26

Misconceptions………………………………………...………60

Gravida………………………………………………………...82

Jayne Types……………………………………………..…….113

Company………………………………….…………………..140

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although this collection contains “dark” motherhood stories, none of this would exist without the lights of my life. Thank you to my three boys (one big, two little) for the time, space, inspiration, and unconditional love and support they’ve provided throughout this process.

Thank to you Kent State for funding me, the NEOMFA for educating me, Varley O’Connor for helping me, and my thesis committee and colleagues for reading me.

The term “gravida” comes from the Latin gravidus, gravida, gravidum and has three separate but related meanings:

1.) A pregnant woman

2.) Number of pregnancies, regardless of their outcomes.

3.) Weighted down

This collection revolves around these definitions. These stories are works of fiction. Some ring more true than others.

THE BIRTH PLAN

When I was five or six, I thought I had a firm understanding of the labor and delivery process. Babies came from bellies and left behind thick scars like the ones I had seen on my mother’s thin, white middle—a lengthwise stroke for me, a up-and-down line for my brother, pockmark scars from the staples —a reminder to her of where we came from, just like our own belly buttons reminded us. In my kindergarten mind, vaginas were for peeing, and the reason women screamed while they were in labor was because they knew the doctors were going to cut them open, and they knew it was probably going to hurt.

If you had asked me then where the dad was during the birth process, the answer would be easy; he would be in the waiting room, watching television and reading a newspaper. He would sit there eating a bologna and mayo sandwich until the nurse, wearing one of those white, angular bonnets with a red cross on it, burst through the swinging hospital doors, interrupting Dan Rather on the evening news to announce, “It’s a girl, sir!” And the new dad, in his button-down shirt with sweaty armpits, would loosen his tie, grab the bouquet of flowers from the end table, and rush in to meet his family. In my head, it happened exactly like that.

Thirty years later, I was six months pregnant, listening to my best friend Claire

clamor about childbirth over decafs, hers soy, mine with half-and-half. Claire, one-eighth

Sioux, with dark eyes and hair, has a baby-birthing body—tall, with curvy hips, and muscular arms and calves that bulge when she loads her three small girls into her oversized truck. Claire works full-time as a lawyer, eats cheesecake, runs marathons, plays with Play-doh. I was barely holding it together as a pregnant, part-time teacher. If we were traveling westward in the mid-1800s, you’d find Claire giving birth with one arm and fixing a wheel axle with the other, while I’d be in the covered wagon, probably drinking whiskey and dying of dysentery.

“Oh, c’mon,” she said. “You and Jake have to at least consider a natural birth.”

By natural, she didn’t mean vaginal. She meant drug-free, meditative, painful, and vaginal. And while it was nice of her to include my husband in the conversation, I was sure he was more focused on our son’s entrance into the world than his exit from my body.

“You are meant to birth a baby without drugs. Sure, it hurts. But the recovery is easy, and you’ll be so happy you at least tried it,” she said, gulping her coffee so piping hot that it made my tongue hurt. I blithely blew on mine.

I liked trying new things. I had tried hot yoga once. I went on a Paleolithic diet where I ate nothing but meat and green vegetables for eight days. I had been skydiving and SCUBA diving. But it was more like I dabbled in these things, put my toe in the deep end before running back to my lawn chair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to dabble in natural childbirth. I didn’t know if you could dabble in it, really.

“I don’t know, Claire. Given the choice, I choose less pain over more pain, you

know? I take Advil, put Band-aids on paper cuts.” She nodded like she agreed, but then tossed her black hair back for the counter-argument.

“It’s not just about you any more though. I’m not going to scare you with statistics or tell you what epidurals do to babies—it drugs them too, you know—but at the very least you should take the Bradley Childbirth class. You like to learn. Why wouldn’t you want to make as informed a decision about your child’s birth as possible?” she asked.

I told her I would think about it.

What Claire didn’t know, what no one at that time knew, was how wholly unnatural my path to motherhood already was.

The baby in my belly was the stuff of science fiction. He was made on a Tuesday afternoon in a second-floor laboratory by a woman in a lab coat who selected one of my husband’s healthy sperm from a petri dish and plunged it into one of my bulbous eggs, like a needle through a stubborn blister. She did this six times, once for each egg that had been retrieved from my ovaries under twilight anesthesia hours earlier. The litter of six embryos whittled down to two after attrition and a failed fresh IVF cycle, and the twin remainders were cryogenically frozen in a laboratory cooler for three months (I paid $93 in rent) before a thaw and transfer of the two embryos back into my uterus via a small pipette. I watched the process on a Jumbotron-like screen that electronically descended from the ceiling. Getting pregnant on an alien spaceship might be a similar process.

I have a photo, taken when my son was a mass of eight cells, next to the second embryo, that, for whatever reason, didn’t stick around. Even a mother can’t tell the two apart, which one made it, which one didn’t. The cells in the photo overlap like circles in

a Venn diagram, each cell’s shape clear, its destiny yet unknown, and I could look at that picture for hours and not begin to fathom how those circles, so crude that I could draw them in seconds with a pencil on the back of a cocktail napkin, could ever become something else. So simple, and basic, and beautiful. But not exactly natural.

The week after I met with Claire I saw my obstetrician for my twenty-week appointment. While I sat on the cold, paper covered exam table, he mentioned that I needed to start thinking about a childbirth course, and he suggested a four-hour accelerated program that met for one morning in the hospital basement. They served donuts and covered the basics, he said.

“It’s only four hours?” I asked, remembering my conversation with Claire. Four- hour birth classes felt analogous to a four minute wait for food at a favorite sit-down restaurant; you’d like to imagine that the preparation took a little bit more time.

“These days, all that women seem to want to know is where to park at the hospital, what door to enter, and when they can get an epidural,” my doctor said. I was a little offended. Maybe we could squeeze in a quick tummy tuck while we were at it.

But I didn’t see myself writhing around in a birthing tub, either. I went home and looked online at the birth class offerings. There was the quick and dirty four-hour course my doctor had mentioned. There was a class for people who wanted c-sections. There were some Lamaze classes, which Claire had said was the method of our mothers’ generation. Then there was the thirty-six hour, twelve week Bradley Childbirth Method course with a description that read, “This class is for couples who anticipate an unmedicated birth experience, although medication options are discussed. The emphasis

of the class is on normal, abdominal breathing and total relaxation techniques.” I liked some of these words. “Normal,” “relaxation,” even “unmedicated” didn’t seem laced with pain when written like this, and nowhere was “hard-core” or “crazy” mentioned. I signed us up. At the very least, I figured we could rule the natural method out.

I didn’t tell Jake about the full scope of the Bradley Method commitment until we were in the car on our way to the first meeting.

“So what are we doing in this class tonight?” Jake asked as he drove down the highway.

“I don’t know. Get-to-know-you stuff probably. Maybe an ice-breaker.”

“Do you know how long this is going to take? Will we be home for the Ohio

State game?”

“They said three hours.”

“Three hours? What will we do for three hours?”

It was time to break the news.

“The class is three hours for twelve weeks,” I said.

A pause. He looked at me, aghast.

“Thirty-six hours? My business school classes didn’t take that long.”

“Childbirth is harder than your business school classes,” I said.

“I mean, having a kid doesn’t even take thirty-six hours, does it? Even if we spent every hour preparing for a specific hour of labor…”

“Having a kid takes nine months. Labor can take days.” I was starting to get annoyed. He considered this for a minute.

“Well,” he sighed. “I guess if you think about it, we’ve taken the slow and steady path to get this point anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said. We drove past the road construction on our way to learn how to have a baby.

My husband is a simple man. I don’t mean simple in a demeaning way, but simple as in uncomplicated. He is a corn-fed kid, the son of Bobbie Lee (brother to Billie

Joe and Larry Wayne) and Elizabeth O’Malley, who was raised on a wheat farm off a long dirt road in Oklahoma. Bobbie Lee was from Bentonville back when Bentonville was a nowhere town in Arkansas, and he escaped by becoming an ambulance driver, a mortician’s assistant, and a 28-year old freshman at Arkansas State. He was one of the only kids in his class to go to college, the first in his family. However, had he stayed in

Bentonville, and worked as a stock boy at Sam’s Five and Dime like the other kids in his class, he would have ended up like them—retired off Wal-Mart stock options, driving

Lamborghinis to the fortieth high school reunion, parking his jet at the Bentonville airport. (When asked about this turn of events, my father-in-law says he’d never do it differently.) My in-laws believe in the oft-recited mantra that “good, clean living” lands wholesome people the simple joys in life, like good parking spots and nice breakfast waitresses. Most of their ideology wore off on their only son.

Jake grew up playing football, participating in math club, going to Mass every

Saturday night. He played with GI Joe plastic planes and wanted nothing other than to be an Air Force pilot. He still looks the part-- six foot four, clean khakis and a self-styled crew cut (trimmed every Sunday night in our bathroom), but when he was eighteen the

recruiter told him his red/green colorblindness would never land him a spot in the cockpit. So now he manages a warehouse where things are cut and dry—office supplies are bought, stored, and sold. On good days, he promotes a guy from the packing to filling department; on bad days, conveyors break down, orders miss the trailer, he lets someone go. He likes PBS documentaries, Thanksgiving flag football, Johnny Cash, and he’ll go to the ballet so long as we stop at the bar on the way home to watch the last quarter of whatever game he missed.

Jake wanted to be a dad as much as I wanted to be a mom. They say infertility can break a marriage—the stress, the blame, the planned sex and plastic cups at the sperm lab. It strengthened ours. Through the process, he was the rational one. “This may not happen the way we planned, but we will be parents one day,” he’d say. When I told him

I was pregnant, his eyes welled with tears. “We are ready for this,” he said. I hugged him, and I believed him.

The Bradley Method childbirth class met in Conference Room B at the Family

Health Center. Upstairs was the lab and cryogenic cooler where our baby was made. We had come full circle. Some couples might get nostalgic over a specific conception date, or a place (Paris, a Super 8, the back of a car), but we had our fertility clinic and attached lab, just off the interstate.

The conference room had the Lysol and linoleum smell of a doctor’s office. The tan, accordion style partitions that could have divided the room into thirds were pushed open. Textured, beige wallpaper peeled in spots around the metal-framed windows, which looked out onto wet pavement laced with snow under a mottled gray 5:00pm

Sunday sky. There was little hope for anything but gray over the next twelve weeks—

January 4 through March 22 were the bleakest weeks Cleveland had to offer, full of slush, forgotten strands of Christmas lights, and seasonal affective disorder. Yet there was something welcoming about the illuminated room in the dark building, containing pregnant women and the energy of the unknown.

We were the last to arrive. I surveyed the crowd while Jake wrote on our blue and white “Hello My Name Is” tags. I had anticipated a, shall I say, “earthy” crew. I expected people in touch with their bodies and inner chi, people who knew that an empowered birth was what they wanted. People like Claire, who only consumed Fair

Trade coffee and free-range grass-fed beef, people who organized rallies against puppy mills and natural gas drilling. People I admired and whose gusto I respected, and people who would be my friends so long as they forgave the fact that I often forgot my recycled grocery bags when I went to Whole Foods, and that I didn’t usually go to Whole Foods.

A man in his unseasonal open-toed sandals was taking off his green Patagonia fleece in the corner. A woman so pretty and thin that it was difficult not to stare (and wonder how she escaped the bloating that plagued the rest of us) sat at the apex of the horseshoe rubbing her belly while her less attractive and older male partner looked at her dotingly. An Asian man whispered into his cell phone and held a finger to his opposite ear while his wife looked out the window. A couple with matching, circular horn- rimmed glasses flipped through the class materials. A pair of women shared a red blanket across their laps, camouflaging which one of them might be pregnant underneath.

“Oh shit,” I whispered to Jake as we gathered materials from the sign-in table.

“What?” he asked.

“I forgot a blanket.”

“A blanket?”

“Yes, we were supposed to bring a blanket,” I whispered.

“We aren’t planning on having the baby here, are we?” he whispered back.

“No, it’s for exercises I think.”

“Exercises?”

“Stretches, maybe?”

“What kind of class is this?”

“Oh, go sit down,” I said, chuckling, nudging him toward a chair.

Our instructor, Heather, was an attractive, petite woman in her mid-40’s with a dark brown pixie haircut, cargo pants, and a long, black Mr. Rogers-type cardigan. She wrote her name on the white board next to a television and VCR on a rolling cart.

Heather explained that she had her PhD in psychology, but after having children, she decided her calling was to be a doula, or birth coach, and she had assisted in hundreds of births in Cleveland, some natural, some not. She discussed the Bradley method, which focused on understanding each stage of labor, learning relaxation techniques, and preparing the partners for their role as primary birth coach. Jake shifted a bit in his seat when she explained that the success of natural birth was as much about the partner’s support as it was the mother’s body. The statistics were impressive. 86% of women who had been through Bradley training would go on to have a natural birth. I looked around and did the math. Statistically, one of us would fail.

Heather asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves and say what type of birth we envisioned.

“I just want to breathe this baby out,” said the pretty woman with long, glossy brown hair that draped over her perky chest. She demonstrated that she had been practicing by taking a deep yoga breath and moving her arms from her shoulders down to her belly as she exhaled. Several men in the room stared at her and nodded. I tried not to roll my eyes.

There were doctors, waitresses, teachers—all confident women and their partners who explained how they knew natural birth was right for them. How they had always wanted this, couldn’t imagine it any other way. Then, my turn.

“I’m, um, well, not sure what kind of birth I want, so I am here to learn about, you know, the different ways to have a baby. Not that there are really different ways to have a baby, mostly there is one way, but you know…”

“Oh, I love helping women who aren’t certain about the type of birth they want,”

Heather said. She smiled.

“You’ll love me then, I said.

At the end of our first class, Heather asked us to write down, on a scale of one to ten, how confident we were in our resolution to have a natural birth, with “one” meaning that we wanted every drug available and “ten” meaning we were positive we wanted to go natural, even refusing medication or a c-section if deemed medically necessary. I wrote down my number in my notebook. Then she asked our partners to do the same, indicating how confident they were in our natural birthing abilities. I tried to look over at

Jake’s answer, but he smiled and cupped his hand over his number. Then Heather rolled out a long sheet of laminated paper, with the numbers 1-10 crudely written in various colors of ink. She asked us to stand on our number.

I took my place on five, the ‘tweener spot in the land of the indecisive. The Asian woman straddled the six and seven. The majority stood near eight and nine; the woman in the horn-rimmed glasses stood on ten. Heather sized us up. Yes, she said, this is usually how it goes. Then she asked our partners to stand on their numbers. A flock of men headed to nine and ten, showing an unwavering confidence in their partner’s potential. The lesbian couple linked arms near eight. Jake came and stood to the right of me.

“Are you on four or five?” Heather asked Jake.

“Four,” he said.

I shot him a look.

He smiled and waited until no one was looking.

“Relax, hon. I actually wrote down a two,” he whispered.

The blanket, as it turned out, was for end-of-class massage time. I tried to pretend it wasn’t a little strange taking off my socks, pumping the communal vanilla-smelling lotion into Jake’s hands, sitting on the floor (everyone else was on a blanket), with my feet in Jake’s lap while he awkwardly kneaded them with one hand and leaned back on the other. Heather dimmed the lights and played Ravi Shankar chants while imparting specific instructions on which way to rub the area between the big and second-biggest toe. We couldn’t look at each other without laughing.

“I feel like we are in some odd sex therapy orgy class or something,” he whispered as he mindlessly squeezed a tendon on my calloused feet.

“Shhh,” I said. “She’s looking at you, and ouch, that hurts,” I said, kicking him in the thigh.

“This pain is nothing, sweetie. I’m just gearing you up.”

Heather didn’t waste any time with the birth videos. Second class, there they were. Someone, perhaps a pregnant porn star or a gung-ho Bradley educator from this decade, was desperately needed to revamp the footage. Every movie we saw had a late-

1970’s, early 1980’s cast to it, and the pubic hair on the birthing women’s lady parts was nothing short of impressive in its length and thickness, unmatched by the heads of baby hair that gaped out from their dark brown pelts. I spent most of the first movie watching

Jake watch the movie. His discomfort was palpable. Most of the other men in the room sat stoically. The guy in the open-toed sandals sort of smirked, a vestige of his sixth- grade self in sex-ed class. Jake sat on his hands and shifted right, then left. He coughed and stared at the ceiling, then looked out the window, like he was waiting for someone else to arrive.

“Oh for God’s sake, Jake,” I whispered.

“What?” he asked, grateful for the diversion.

“It’s a vagina, not a horror movie.”

“I know what it is,” he quipped back.

“Then why do you look like you are watching Night of the Living Dead?”

“It’s just,” he stammered. “It’s just, right there. It’s alarming. And big.”

“Babies aren’t tiny,” I said.

“Yeah, no kidding. I was ten pounds, four ounces, remember?” he said. This was true. His mother had kept reminding me of the size of the O’Malley babies.

On the movie, the baby crowned, and the mother gave a deep, guttural groan, contorting her face as she pushed and sweated. Her husband kneeled between her legs to help catch the baby. I found myself shifting in my chair.

“We will have you stay north, during this part, I think,” I said.

“Deal,” he said.

An entire class was devoted to practicing laboring positions. Labor was a difficult thing to mimic, to imagine even, when you hadn’t experienced it before. Heather set up ten “labor stations” for us to rotate through, with instructional note cards and diagrams at each one. To help imitate discomfort, Heather gave each pregnant woman fresh ice cubes to hold. Hands dripping, bellies bulging, we went from station to station with our partners. We bounced on giant pink exercise balls, squatted, hung like chimps around our partner’s necks, threaded our arms through our thighs and grabbed our knees, exposing our crotches.

“That’s hot,” Jake said when we got to the crotch station. He towered over me.

“These ice cubes don’t bother me a bit,” I said proudly, looking up at him between my ankles.

Heather stopped by our station.

“Good position there, mom-to-be. Dad, you should be on her level here, stroking her hair, holding her hand, giving encouragement.”

“Gotcha,” he said, quickly crouching down, knees and elbows flailing every which way.

“What do you want me to say to you?” he whispered.

“What’s the most encouraging thing you can think of?” I asked. He thought about it for a second.

“No one thinks you can hold those ice cubes for much longer.” He paused, smiling. “But I do,” he said and stroked my hair.

I was starting to think that maybe, just maybe, this whole natural birth thing was something we could do together.

As the weeks went on, we grew more comfortable. We didn’t wince as much during the birth videos, and I saw Jake shed a small tear when he watched a new dad cut the umbilical cord after watching a particularly dramatic birth. If there was some remaining angst regarding the process, Jake vented it into industrious note taking. He wrote down the “Six Needs of Laboring Women” and self-action notes for each. Next to

Need #3 (Physical Comfort), he made a list, “Get lots of pillows. Let her suck on a wet washrag. Remind her to turn over every thirty minutes. Remind her to pee. She might be hot. She might be cold.” He made these lists in type-like, uppercase letters. He listed the

Emotional Signposts of Labor, The First Stage of Birth, The Second Stage of Birth, written in outline form like a middle schooler is taught. A. B. C., a. b. c., i, ii, iii. He wrote “cervix” a lot, and took more notes than anyone else in class.

Class met on Superbowl Sunday. Jake had never missed a Superbowl. There was a vote on whether to cancel, and he was too shy to be the only dissenter; plus, it was our

snack week. The class had decided early on that we’d take turns bringing food. The first volunteers brought hummus, cut vegetables, and a large container of apple juice. Afraid to offend the healthy sensibilities of natural birthing women, future volunteers followed suit, occasionally adding the granola bar option, substituting orange juice for apple. Jake would eye the hummus and veggies suspiciously. Then it was our turn. I sent Jake to the store. He brought home Oreos and Doritos. But also hummus, carrots, and apple juice.

I found myself re-reading the class materials at home. The Bradley facts were clear, reiterated at every turn: recovery for women with natural childbirths was easier, the babies were more alert, there was less vaginal tearing, less chance of a c-section, higher success rates with breastfeeding, and fewer complications. There was no downside. The pain was temporary, even forgettable. A few women even had orgasms during unmedicated birth. While aiming for that seemed a bit unreasonable, the rest didn’t. I was getting in the mindset and was coming around to the idea that the natural method might be the best way to have a baby.

After class on week nine, we asked Heather to be our doula. Although Jake would be my primary birth coach, we felt comfortable having Heather there to remind us of the things we would ostensibly forget. Heather hugged us and said she’d love to be part of the experience. She wrote us a letter, telling us how happy she was about our progress in the class, how much more confident we seemed since the first day. Heather was a natural born coach, the kind of woman you’d ask to help you train for a marathon, swing a golf club, or teach your kid how to read. She was empowering, strong, and a good teacher, the kind of woman and mother I wanted to be.

She recommended we write a birth plan, using the Bradley manual for guidance.

The birth plan was a letter to the delivery doctor and nurses informing them of our wishes both before and during the birth. The sample letters in the manual were authoritarian in their wording and if/then statements. Most said no drugs, no hospital admittance until seven or eight centimeters dilated, no devices to monitor the baby unless medically necessary. In one plan, the mom asked for a full-size mirror to watch the baby crown.

Another had a strong preference for no talking in the delivery room. “Can I ask for a beer?” Jake joked. We wrote up a simple, polite plan, asking that they allow us to try a natural birth but that the doctor should intervene as he saw fit to deliver the baby safely.

We typed our names, printed out a few copies, and put them in the bedroom corner where we had started stockpiling gear to take to the hospital.

During the last class, we talked about our favorite potential labor positions (I thought bouncing on the exercise ball in a hot shower sounded lovely), discussed postpartum concerns, and Heather rolled out the laminated number mat again. We did the exercise from the first class, and Jake and I both put my likelihood for a natural childbirth at an eight. I stood there proudly next to the lesbians and the pretty girl.

Heather winked at us. We hugged our classmates good-bye, and said we’d see them and their babies at the class reunion in a few months. As we were leaving, Heather reminded us to call her during early labor. The next time she’d see us we’d be having a baby.

I met with Claire the day after the last Bradley class.

“So,” she said, her eyes wide and probing, “You going to try a natural birth?”

“I think I am a convert,” I said.

“Knew it,” she said, smiling. “You guys been practicing the special massage?”

I blushed. She was talking about the perineum massage, and there was nothing relaxing or special about it. The massage was meant to stretch the birth passage and required two people, a handful of olive oil, a gooseneck lamp, and a lot of humility.

“Yeah, a few times,” I said. “Not sexy.”

“Nope, not sexy, but necessary. You’ve got some folks with big noggins in your family. Gotta stretch out for that.”

“I think I am ready, Claire. I really do. I’m doing those pelvic exercises, and meditating, and listening to those mantras each night while I bounce on that giant ball.”

“Atta girl. I’m excited and proud of you, girlie.” Claire didn’t toss these words around casually.

“I can’t wait for this, Claire. I really can’t wait.”

And then, the following week at my routine thirty-five week doctor’s visit, I found out the baby couldn’t wait either. The nurse took my urine and vitals, as she had every week, and then told me to lie down on the exam table on my right side. My doctor came in and his face fell as he looked at my chart. My blood pressure had skyrocketed from normal to well above normal in a single week. There was protein in my urine. I had early symptoms of pre-eclampsia, the condition formally known as toxemia, a leading cause of fetal and maternal death, or “demise” as my doctor called it. Demise sounded worse than death the way he said it. There was no rebuttal. I called Jake at work and told him to go home and put the items in the corner of our bedroom in a bag.

He could leave the birth plan at home, I told him.

There are several things no one tells you about having a c-section.

They don’t tell you that the needle for the spinal anesthesia is almost four inches long. You must sit on the operating table, legs dangling over the sides, and curl your spine so the resident anesthesiologist can find the right spot between your vertebrae to make his injection. You are alone—no doulas or partners or moms allowed in the room for this part—only a prep team in masks and blue paper jump suits. You must remain absolutely still, which would be fine, but you know how long that needle is, and you know the risks if this is botched up because you actually read the consent form, which warned of spinal shock, cardiac arrest, paralysis, broken needles, and severe headache.

You are shaking. Your teeth are chattering. A nurse asks if you want to hold her hand.

You ask if you can hug her. She nods, but she is surprised when you wrap your arms around her neck and then your legs around her narrow hips, like she’s a tree and the bulldozer is coming, loud and close.

They don’t tell you that they are going to tie your arms down. As they thread your hands through the thick leather straps, they ask if you know the sex of the baby. As they fasten the metal buckles, they ask what you’ll name him. As they tighten the restraints, they ask if you are feeling okay.

A nurse tells you, using subtle, imprecise wording, that they are going to shave your pubic hair. You realize then that your gown is wide open, and you are glad you can’t lift your head to see if your legs are shackled too.

They need to know if the anesthesia is working, so they rub ice down your body.

“Can you feel this? This? That?” One side feels something, you think. To mitigate this,

they tilt the board you are lying on to distribute the drugs to the other side. This seems like a crude way to go about this, but then again, what do you know? You are strapped to a board. You are Davinci’s Vetruvian man. The room begins to spin.

Ah, here they are, finally. My doctor, whom I have seen dozens of times, a distinctive looking man with an upturned nose and a thin mouth, looks generic in his scrubs and mask. He could be anybody. Jake is right behind him, suited up in paper, topped off with a puffy blue cap that looks like he’s headed for a shower.

“Nice hat,” I say. I didn’t realize how terribly my teeth were chattering, a combination of the freezing cold room and the morphine pumping through my body.

I can’t tell if he’s smiling under the mask. I can tell by his eyes that he’s nervous.

He holds my hand. If he’s surprised about the leather straps, he doesn’t say anything.

They put up a paper curtain, clipped on a clothesline string over my chest. This is to shield us from the carnage, a different technique than the mirrors that were encouraged in a Bradley birth to view the baby’s crowning.

The birth begins. The doctor keeps me vaguely informed.

“We’re breaking your water now,” he says. In class, we had learned the minutia of what too look for when water breaks—color, quantity, presence of meconium. “Fluid is clear,” my doctor says.

They slice me open, but they don’t tell me when. I know from the tugging. Even though I am numb from my chest down, I can feel the violent pulling in the places where

I have feeling—in my neck, in my teeth, my cheeks. If I didn’t know differently, I would have thought the baby was lodged in my collarbone—the pressure is violent and fierce.

Jake doesn’t know what to say. None of the words in his Bradley notebook seem appropriate here. Those words focused on partner empowerment and control.

“You’re doing so well. Are you okay?” he asks over and over. I nod, wince in between tugs.

The birth isn’t perfect. Our son, four and half weeks early, is stuck, the cord wrapped twice around his neck. They use a vacuum to remove him and cut his cord so he can breathe. He doesn’t cry. Then he does cry, but it is a bark, like a seal might make. I had been warned of this, premature boys often have immature lungs. I ask, “Is he okay?” over and over. Yes, they say, he’s okay, as a team of four or five rushes in and begins giving him oxygen through a hand-pump device. Someone says they are going to take him to the NICU for a bit. “Go,” I say to Jake. “Go follow him.” I am helpless, open on the table.

“I want to stay with you,” he says. He looks over at our son on the table as if he’s a stranger.

“I want you to follow him. Please follow him.” My teeth are chattering so much that I am not sure he can understand me.

He trails the small cart, looking back at me, as the doctor threads a needle and sews me back together.

During our hospital stay, I saw four Bradley classmates come in, have their babies, and leave. One after one they breathed their babies out.

After fifteen nights in the hospital, we were all home, with a breathing monitor for our son, but home nonetheless.

I’d learn at our Bradley reunion, six weeks later, that everyone had a successful, natural, unmedicated birth. Everyone except us. The Bradley statistics were spot-on.

Heather gave us a small refund on our doula deposit.

We swapped birth stories. The Bradley students had imperfect moments during their births. The guy in the sandals had passed out as he cut the umbilical cord. The lesbians had a fender bender on the way to the hospital. The pretty girl’s water broke while she was doing a presentation at work. The girl with the horn-rimmed glasses had a third degree tear and still walked funny. They listened with amazement as I held my son, perfect and lovely, and told our story.

I have a scar, deep and low, much less imposing than my mother’s. Once purple and a little thick on one end where they had to use the vacuum, the scar has since changed to red, and then to brown, but it will never completely fade away. It’s a battle scar. A jagged line, a reminder of things considered, desired, and ultimately, earned.

IF YOU LEARN THE FATE OF FREDDY (a notice to the NICU nurses on the seventh floor)

As you are now undoubtedly aware, last week I was fired from my job as a neonatal ICU nurse because I told Freddy’s parents that Freddy was going to die. I want to explain how I arrived at that conclusion, to show you, my fellow nurses, that my statement was not some demonic act (as perceived by our administrators at Children’s

Hospital) but an utterance that was made after careful consideration and understanding.

I knew about Freddy because I had studied the variables. After the night shift, I change out of my nursing shoes, walk back to my apartment, fry two eggs, and enter the night’s data in my spreadsheet. I have 112 variables to consider for each of our patients. Some are obvious: gestational age, oxygen saturation levels, birth weight, Apgar scores; others are subtle: mother’s age, diapers filled in 24 hours, type of ventilator.

Others are even less obvious, but no less important: parents’ approximate weight, number of parental visits, mother’s interest in breastfeeding (scale 1-9), the detection of cigarette smoke on the father’s shirt.

I’ll have you know that I have correctly predicted the deaths of 87 babies, which of course means nothing without the denominator, and I can get that information, broken down by gestation or obstetrician or whatever else might be of interest. My predications are 96% accurate within two standard deviations. The variables seldom lie.

The origins of the variables are as old as I am. Older, even. In 1945, a few weeks before she was due to give birth, my mother’s doctor asked her if she had been feeling the baby kick. “Yes,” she said, “I feel all four feet.” The doctor, who often heard such things from first time mothers out on the Kansas farms, examined her more closely and found two distinct heartbeats and a rump and a head impossibly situated for a singleton.

He told my mother that both Baby A and Baby B seemed okay, but she needed to stay in bed until delivery. My mother, convinced we were girls, named us Adeline and Bernice.

She lay flat in her iron bed until we began to stir. We arrived, she said, in the muggy calm before an August thunderstorm, when the windows of the farmhouse were open, and the bedroom drapes hung damp and still.

Adeline died before supper. Her headstone reads, in a single line: Adeline, August

8. The other half of the headstone is empty, as if she were waiting on her spouse. Of course, she was waiting for me. We were identical twins, the doctor said, and what took

Baby A would likely take me too. My mother was practical, and headstones were expensive.

Here I am, though, hopefully years away from the gravediggers disrupting the

Kansas silt next to my Adeline to bury me. And I have spent my career on a mission to understand what my mother and her doctor could not have known: what variables differentiate A from B, B from A, life from death in the smallest of patients.

Each night, as we scrubbed our hands at the nurses’ station, and you all discussed your forays from the previous day and complained about too many hours or not enough, I planned which variables to gather from my first patient. This quest was always

clandestine, gathered from charts, lab results, and whispers.

I can promise you that I never let my knowledge of the variables affect my patient care; never have I ignored a wail or skimped on diaper cream once I learned a baby’s fate. It would have been easy to favor the living over the dying, but if I had to choose, honestly, I might have paid more attention to the dying. Those were the ones I knew for their entire lives, the Baby A’s.

So I come to the case of Freddy. He was born at twenty-five weeks and two days gestation, if I remember correctly. His parents had been arguing, non-stop, next to his isolette about bills and time off and their other children at home. They were exhausted, worn out from worry. Last Thursday, Freddy’s father left the NICU, and his mother approached me as I was changing another baby’s diaper and asked me my opinion about

Freddy’s condition. She looked at me with that look that only the mother of a dying infant can have: the bankrupt gaze of infinite hope.

I looked at her and then at five-day old Freddy, tangled in hoses that wrapped around his translucent body like red and green umbilical cords, his fingers grasping for things he’d never touch, his chest rising and falling in rhythm with the purr of the churning ventilator. The blue hue from his neighbor’s biliruben lights cast a shadow over

Freddy in his too-big preemie diaper, which covered half of his toneless legs.

Freddy—and his variables—had looked most unfavorable in the previous evening’s study, and so, I told her, no, Freddy likely would not survive, and I was very sorry about that.

When the administrators asked me to recount the details of this conversation, I

tried to tell them about the variables. They shook their heads and said get some rest, go to Florida, visit your niece, clean your locker. So I grabbed my purse, and turned, and said to the youngest suit, “Tell me, if I had instead told the parent, with almost absolute certainty, that I knew that her child would live, would we be here?” He said nothing and pointed to the door.

This turn of events has upset me greatly for many reasons, not the least of which is that my variable collection efforts are, as of now, sorely incomplete.

Please, if you learn the fate of Freddy, please pass along the information so I can update my spreadsheet and close his case.

SPECIMEN

Marlene fancies herself something of a Virgin Mary. There are several differences though. Marlene bears little physical resemblance to the stained glass Mother she sits next to each Sunday at St. Rita’s, the woman with the milky skin, soft eyes, and golden glow radiating from her head. Marlene does not glow. She has a persistent cluster of acne below her bottom lip, frizzy brown hair leftover from a series of bad perms in college, a too small head on too sturdy shoulders atop a five foot one frame, and a patch of chaffed skin between her thighs from the rub of her tight, black poly-blend work pants.

When they were little, Marlene and her little sister June would play Three Billy Goats

Gruff in the culvert behind their house. Slightly gap-toothed Marlene would always play the troll.

Unlike Mary, Marlene is not in search of refuge. She lives one mile from where she grew up outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, in a brown split-level identical to her parents’ home, only reversed, with the kitchen on the upper right instead of the upper left.

Marlene is not poor. For sixteen years she has worked as an accountant at the North

Carolina division of Klipper Kleen Manufacturing, the makers of the antiseptic blue liquid that drowns plastic combs in gym and beauty parlor canisters.

Then there are the similarities between Mary and Marlene. Both are kind,

humble, and unaware. They aren’t the types to match their bras to their underwear. They follow the rules, the speed limit, and the demands put on them by their superiors. But few know the biggest similarity of all, the one Marlene keeps close to her slightly lop- sided, plus-sized chest.

Marlene is about to become a pregnant virgin.

***

Marlene finds the Andrology Lab in a basement corner of the downtown medical building. She remembers being in this building once for hernia surgery and wondering what happened in the Andrology Lab. Back then, she figured it was the place where people born with both lady bits and boy parts went to sort the mess out, but now she knows that it is a fancy name for a place where sperm goes to get washed and ready before it goes up there. A sperm salon, of sorts.

It is 10:00am, and there is a couple in the waiting area. They sit in the corner of the windowless, well-lit room next to a large plastic plant. The woman is hissing to the man and tapping his shin with her silver shoe, but he ignores her and reads his newspaper behind dark sunglasses and a black baseball cap.

Marlene walks up to the sliding glass window underneath the “Andrology Lab” sign that hangs from two chains in the ceiling panels. The florescent lights are bright and low, and Marlene can feel her forehead sweat. The receptionist has orange hair and a matching bulbous mole halfway between her nose and lip. She does not open the

window.

“Yes?” she asks. The word bounces off the glass.

“Hi, I’m Marlene. I’m here for a, um, pick-up.” She speaks too loudly for the size of the room.

“Last name?”

“Duffy. Marlene Duffy.”

“ID?”

Marlene rifles through her denim handbag and pulled out her license.

“And you are the one being inseminated today?”

“Yes, I am, the um, insemin-a-tee.”

The receptionist spins around and pulls a file off of the rolling cart. She takes out a single sheet of paper and opens the window with a thud. She scans the sheet while

Marlene holds her breath.

“Says here your specimen was dropped off at 9:07. It has a few minutes left in the washing process. If you want to have a seat, I’ll call your name when it’s ready for transport to the seventh floor,” the receptionist says.

“Oh, thank Jesus,” Marlene says, exhaling the breath she’d been holding. He came through for her.

***

A year ago, around the time of her 39th birthday, Marlene’s best friend Carol (who

bears some resemblance to Marlene, only blonde, with two ex-husbands and two kids in high school) asked Marlene if she thought she might ever want to become a mother.

Truth was, Marlene had been thinking about it. She had been having thoughts, visions almost, of herself holding a baby. Burping it, perhaps. In her daydreams, she was putting a band-aid on a skinned knee, or helping a girl with her math homework.

She could see herself being a mother; she just had a hard time envisioning how she might ever become one. Logistically.

So she shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

“On account of a burning in your loins?” Carol probed.

Marlene didn’t know much about burning loins. But she did appreciate a good graph, with well-marked axes and a clear line, and she had seen plenty of them that showed a fertility free-fall after age thirty-five. She’d be forty in November, and in a couple of years that thin red fertility line would collide with the x-axis, smashing any hope of motherhood to smithereens. “I don’t want to rule the idea out,” Marlene had said.

“You best get movin’, my dear,” Carol replied. “You know, a hundred years ago, you’d have been a grandma by now.” Carol had a way of putting things that got

Marlene’s attention.

Over the next several months, Marlene observed mothers at the grocery checkout, watched British nannies discipline spoiled children on the women’s TV network. She found herself at her sister June’s house across town more often. Her sister had four small kids and a husband who worked the night shift, and a lot of overtime, in Klipper Kleen’s

quality control department.

On her visits to her sister’s, Marlene studied the more mundane mothering responsibilities; the way June would dice bananas (paring knife blade up, brushing her thumb with each portion, the slices softly plopping down on the highchair tray where her second youngest, Owen, would pound them with his fists.) She asked June questions, like why little Jacob spat up so much, at what age kids got teeth, how best to bathe wet, squirmy babies. Her sister, too busy and stressed to think about why her big sister would care about such things, would answer curtly and then toss a rag, a diaper, or a kid in

Marlene’s direction. Marlene didn’t complain.

In January, a young couple moved into the split-level next door. They moved in on a chilly Saturday morning, and Marlene watched from her eat-in kitchen window as they unloaded the first items from their light blue mini-van: a box of diapers, a small reclining seat, and a tiny bundle, wrapped in a pink blanket, her tiny head exposed. That baby should be wearing a hat, Marlene thought. She ransacked her pantry for items to throw together a batch of chocolate-chip cookies (just missing the baking powder and half the chips) and took them over when they were still warm. The couple, preoccupied with unloading and arguing about where furniture should be placed, thanked Marlene for the cookies and handed her the pink bundle.

“This is Baby Gracie,” the young mother said. “You can hold her if you want.”

Marlene eyed the mother’s visible tattoos and fake looking bosoms critically, but then gazed at Baby Gracie, eight weeks old, who looked up at Marlene and smiled.

Marlene took the baby and cradled her in her arms. With that, Marlene felt an actual

stirring, deep in her midsection, above her bowels and below her bellybutton, that gave pricks of energy to the rest of her body and made the hair on her arms stand on end. This must be what they mean by the burning loins, she thought.

“Baby Gracie likes you,” the young dad with a crew cut said as he fumbled with the crib mattress.

“I think she does,” Marlene said, not taking her eyes off of the infant’s hand, which grasped Marlene’s index finger so tightly that her tiny knuckles had turned white.

The dad haphazardly put a pink sheet on the mattress. Marlene had a strong desire to smooth the wrinkles and inquire as to whether the baby had a proper knit cap to keep her head warm (the front door was propped open, a breeze blowing in) but she kept her mouth shut. “Time for a nap, Gracie,” the dad said, approaching Marlene with outstretched arms. Marlene didn’t want to let her go.

That afternoon, she went to Belk’s department store. She bought an extra

Christmas stocking, embroidered with a snowman, on clearance. On that same trip, she bought a pair of work pants in size 16, her actual size (rather than a 12 or 14, her

“hopeful size”) thereby opening herself up to the concept of a growing belly.

That night, as she lay in one of the two twin beds in her room with a stenciled rose border and dark green carpet, she thought of Baby Gracie’s grip. She thought of legacy and companionship, of shoe tying and Dr. Seuss, of backyard camping and tooth fairies, of the inheritances of her perfectly shaped toes, her acumen toward numbers, and the empty room down the hall. She thought of pulling the crib sheet tight, and saying goodnight to someone else. She decided then to see about becoming a mother.

***

Marlene picks a chair perpendicular to the couple in the corner of the Andrology lab. The man itches and digs at the groove of his crotch with his thumb and forefinger and his wife kicks him again. Marlene thinks the woman looks like a leopard. She’s about Marlene’s age, with long peroxide blonde hair, a deep v-neck animal-print shirt, lots of sunspot freckles, and long, hot pink nails. Marlene gets the vibe that her overweight, bearded husband is already a dad, from a previous marriage or two, and he’d rather be looking out the window on the vasectomy floor than be in the fertility basement.

The receptionist calls the man’s name. The leopard woman jumps out of her seat and walks over to pick up a plastic cup with a screw-on lid and a filing sticker stuck on the side. The woman walks back to her husband, hands him the cup and points to the closed door on the other side of the plastic plant.

The man sighs and grabs the cup without looking at her. He uses the armrests of the chair to help him stand, and he lumbers toward the door.

“Good luck, honey,” she says. “Make us some good ones.”

The man heaves another sigh and closes the door behind him with a bang.

Marlene wonders what’s in the room. Was there a chair? Paper towels? Some type of pornography? Oh god, she wonders, would she hear anything? The basement is silent except a small hum from the overhead lights. She pushes the thought from her mind and picks up a brochure on venereal disease.

***

Marlene has never had a man. No one really knows the extent of this statement except Marlene. At a certain age, friends don’t inquire about one’s virginity, and even

June figures she must have had forays with men back in college or perhaps even at the seedy bars near the Klipper Kleen plant.

Both June and Carol have tried, without success over the years, to set Marlene up with men. Six months ago Carol went with Marlene to a speed-dating party in the

Cornelius Holiday Inn lobby. Marlene met fifteen men for three minutes each and ranked them—most pleasant at the top, perverts and weirdoes at the bottom. The women were then given the contact information of the men who were most interested in them.

Marlene’s heart raced a little when she opened the envelope. Two men had wanted her number. She nervously looked up their names on her master sheet. They were numbers fourteen and fifteen on her list (one had asked to see her feet and the other had casually mentioned his penis size.) Marlene would rather be alone in the Andrology lab than be alone with the men who chose her.

There had been earlier opportunities, a couple boys in high school, a few in college, one at work, but small things (cystic back acne, persistent tic, condom outline visibility in the back pocket) kept her from consummating those relationships. Later, she assumed that the right guy was out there—on the Klipper Kleen direct sales team, at

Bible study, in her online orchid lovers chat room. But when he did not come, she was okay. “I think I could be a lesbian if I didn’t have to kiss or touch boobs,” Marlene had

told Carol once. Carol told her maybe she just needed more girl friends.

***

The leopard woman in the corner files her hot pink nails and looks up from time to time at Marlene, who is sitting on her hands, looking at the plastic plant. The woman smiles at her. She has pink lipstick on one of her front teeth.

“You fixin’ to become a momma today?” Her accent is Texan, thick.

“Um, yes, I think so.” Marlene picks up a “What you need to know about your fertility” brochure from the table next to her. She’s seen this one before—the graph has a precipice like the Cliffs of Dover.

“Your husband out getting a coffee? They say the coffee helps the swimmers.

Gives ‘em a little jolt before they do the business, ya know? And I told Frank, ‘Frank, this time you need to drink the coffee and lay off the booze for sixty hours before we come in because the last time and the time before that, you was out bowling the day before and well, look where that got us.’” She shakes her head.

“Nah, I am here alone,” Marlene says.

“You don’t have yourself a husband? Boyfriend, at least?”

“Nope.”

“Ah, I see. You’ve got yourself a girlfriend.” The woman nods knowingly.

“Not that either,” Marlene says.

The leopard woman is puzzled. Marlene can see her think, understand, recall a

talk show where she had seen something similar.

“Well, why, honey… why doncha just adopt? You could have a little one without gettin’ all fat, and you might find yourself one who don’t even need diapers. Those buggers are ex-pen-sive and messy too,” she says.

Marlene had considered adoption. Although a Baptist billboard on I-85 proclaimed “Adoption is always an option,” Marlene found this not to be 100% true.

Single women could adopt in North Carolina, but not without years on a waitlist and over

$25,000 in fees. Foster child adoption was easier, but Marlene was nervous about getting a kid who was old enough to dislike her from the onset. She gave all her options careful consideration.

In the end, she was pretty sure that she had basic equipment to have a baby herself. In her preliminary check-up with a fertility doctor, he said things looked good.

When asked her if she might have any STDs that would impact her fertility, she kept a straight face and said no, that she had been very, very careful. She wondered if he could see through her bluff just by the looks of things down there.

“I’m going to give the natural way a whirl first,” Marlene says to the woman.

“Ain’t nothing natural about doin’ it this way, honey. Nothing natural about this at all.” The leopard woman shakes her head and picks up a Cosmopolitan magazine.

The receptionist doesn’t call Marlene’s name; she just glares from behind the glass and points at her. Marlene grabs her bag and walks toward the counter, where the receptionist flings the window open and passes a brown lunch sack through, as if Marlene just ordered a Big Mac at the Drive-thru.

“You done this before?” the receptionist asks.

“No m’am.”

“Take this up to the seventh floor and give it to the nurse on call as soon as you get up there. Don’t stop in the cafeteria for breakfast, okay? And put the bag under your shirt to keep it warm until you get there, understand?” The receptionist’s tone is most serious.

“Yes, m’am.”

On her way to the elevator, Marlene stuffs the sack into her pants, figuring the temperature to be warmer down there. She looks back to see the leopard woman looking at her and the bulge in her pants. Marlene doesn’t much care how she looks to the leopard woman. Her husband is still in that room, and Marlene is on her way to get pregnant.

***

Sperm donation, Marlene had thought, had a huge upside. Not only did she not have to engage in actual sex, but she could ostensibly find a better father for her child than she could ever date in real life. There were two routes she could choose. There were sperm bank websites, where she could comb through donor profiles and heights and essays and photos. The specimens could be bought same day and shipped overnight in wrappings and ice that Marlene imagined would be similar to Omaha Steak shipments.

But there was something about buying sperm on the internet that felt wrong to her. On

the practical side, she believed in paying cash, keeping printed receipts, knowing whom she was doing business with. On the personal side, the anonymity of fatherhood felt a little dirty, worse than a one night stand, really, because she’d never even meet the donor.

And could she ever really be sure than the man’s profile she reviewed would match the sperm she got in the mail? The whole thing seemed susceptible to a hoax. Moreover, if the donor never wanted to be contacted, did that say something negative about his personality? Would she want her child to inherit the “I-never-want-my flesh-and-blood- to-contact-me” trait? That coldness, she feared, might be dominant.

She briefly considered asking someone she knew to be her donor. There was a man down in Marketing who always said hi and had strong cheekbones and starched shirts. The rumor was that he was gay, and Marlene figured that a gay man might be sympathetic to her cause. But she worried that asking such a favor might constitute some form of harassment if he were not interested, and she couldn’t risk losing her job at a time when inseminations cost $400 a pop.

She had asked Carol if a want ad in the local paper, requesting a meet-up and a subsequent sperm donation, was a bad idea. They combed through the Wednesday personal ads to see if there were any similar inquiries. With the exception of a man looking for a kidney, there was nothing comparable. No competition though, Marlene had noted. Carol suggested Craigslist, and Marlene gave it a look. In the personal ad section, she found some of the things people were looking for were far grosser than sperm, so she wrote up an ad:

Mature, but fun-loving single lady, age 39, seeks a sperm donor in Mecklenburg County. Looking for a sensible, intelligent and kind-hearted man. Would like to meet in person one time, no strings attached thereafter. Will pay $250 plus testing and travel expenses. Serious inquiries only, please.

The ad had taken Marlene twenty minutes to write. She toiled over the phrasing, whether to include more about what she was looking for or why. She thought about including something about her religious faith, but this notion was complicated even for

Marlene.

A devoted, every-Sunday Episcopalian, Marlene grappled with how God might look down at motherhood executed in this fashion. She looked up the origin of words like “illegitimate” to see what negative terms her future child might hear someday (after some research she discovered even the horrible word “bastard” didn’t really mean fatherless but rather “mixed,” and she was fine with mixing.) She thought about talking to her pastor, but feared the awkwardness of that. She considered how God made men who made the science for women to get pregnant without sex (didn’t that make the science ok?), but then also considered how God made serial killers. In church, she’d tune out the sermon and thumb through the Bible. She’d find stories there about less-than perfect families; far worse than hers. One Sunday, she stumbled upon Galatians, a book of laws than her pastor tended to skip over in his sermons. She read verses 5:16-25:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh…Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

She breathed a small sigh of relief when she read this. She knew there were dangers in narrow, personal interpretations of the Bible, but if she were to tally the no- no’s listed here she’d only admit to a little jealousy (of June’s kids, bad as they were), occasional dissensions (over small things at work—rounding errors, tax law changes, misplaced bottles of White-out), and a little sorcery (Carol had hired a psychic last May to come to a party. Marlene reluctantly sat with her for five minutes and was told she’d acquire a new pet and an illness come summer.) On the other hand—love? kindness? self-control?—Marlene could manage those.

She asked Carol if she should mention her faith in her ad. Carol said absolutely not. Carol was not a church-goer and looked a little sideways at people, other than

Marlene, who were. She asked Marlene again whether she was sure she just didn’t want to find an anonymous donor. Why the need to meet him, again? Was it for the kid’s sake? Some sick way to go on a date? But Marlene had her reasons. She wanted to see the man, hear him speak, reference his features, recall his tone and demeanor, gauge his temperament; and later, when she looked at her child, she could take account of what was hers and know, roughly, from where the rest came.

***

The fertility office is on the seventh floor. Marlene has been here a few times before for consultations and screenings. She walks in and sees a nurse in flowered scrubs at the front desk.

“May I help you?” The nurse seems pleasant, with short brown hair and some scarring from teenage acne.

“I’m Marlene, Marlene Duffy. I have a specimen.” Marlene hates that word.

Specimen. Carrying on her species through a vial of sperm in her pants. She wonders if those revisionist feminists would spell the word specimyn or speciwoman.

“Yes, I’ll take that.” The nurse holds out her hand.

The balled up brown bag has slid between Marlene’s legs, half-way to her knee, and she wishes she had fished it out on the elevator. She walks closer to the desk, hoping she can retrieve the bag without the nurse looking over the counter, but her waistband is too tight, and she must unbutton her pants.

“Just a second here,” Marlene says as she slides her hand down to obtain the bag.

She pulls it out—it is warm to the touch, almost damp. She panics for a second that the humidity in her drawers has boiled the sperm.

Blushing, she hands the warm, wrinkled brown bag to the nurse.

“Wanted to keep those fellas toasty,” she says, smiling.

The nurse tells Marlene to take a seat in the waiting room.

***

Marlene received thirty-eight responses to her ad on Craigslist. Thirty-five of them were obscene, a higher percentage than she had anticipated. They ranged from the culinary: “I’ll baste some baby gravy in your lovin turkey muffin;” to the generously

crass: “Why buy my spooge when I can give it to you for free?” to the rhythmic, “Dear

Sperm Junky, I’ve got some Funky Spunky for your Skunky Monkey. PS) Can I get

$300?”

Marlene tried not to let the tone of the responses bring her down. She did have a couple of possibilities in the pile, although one had seven misspellings across nineteen words (37%), another had a beautifully written letter about the importance of motherhood and love of children, but the responder’s email address was meesohorny@somethingorother, and she couldn’t take the chance. That left one, someone who wrote, “I can do it, but would like to know a little more about you.”

Marlene spent an entire evening writing several paragraphs about herself—where she went to school (UNC-C for her BA, CPA at UNC-C), where she had travelled (Canada, twice), what she enjoyed reading (Maeve Binchy novels, Lord of the Rings, online knitting tutorials, and some Star Trek fan sites.) She attached scans of her cutest baby photos and emailed all of this to the man in a nice Word document. She never heard back.

Carol said not to get discouraged. Craigslist was probably a bad idea anyway.

What she needed was to reach out to the young, virile, money-hungry crowd. She said some of her daughter’s friends might be eighteen and willing. This seemed a little lewd and too close to home for Marlene’s tastes. Then one afternoon she received an alumni magazine from UNC-Charlotte (two, actually, one for each degree) and decided that the college-aged crowd might be perfect for her mission. She had read about Harvard girls advertising their eggs in Boston newspapers. She couldn’t see why her ad in the back of

the UNC-C student newspaper should be any different. She wrote one similar to her

Craigslist ad, found the email address for the newspaper, figured out how to send $59 on

Paypal and waited. Eight days later she received her first response.

Dear Mrs, Saw your msg in the school rag. Can help you I think. I’m 22, have no probs in that department or with the little wagsters. Live in Charlotte. Lemme know if u r cool w/it, wanna meet. Peace out.

Wil (Wags, for short)

Marlene was concerned, but she knew from Carol’s daughters that the kids today wrote this way. She sat at her desk and read the response over and over, deciding. It had a clear enough message. She shifted between looking at the home page for the online sperm banks and reading his response. Then she read the original ad she had posted and decided it wasn’t perfect either. She would write him—whoever Wags was—an email to see if he would meet her. She started typing before she could change her mind.

***

A nurse in yellow scrubs enters the waiting room and calls Marlene’s name.

Marlene follows her down the long hallway to a gynecological exam room. There is pink striped wallpaper below the chair rail, and light green paint above it, covered in posters about breast self-exams and ads for birth control pills. A rolling table in the corner has an assortment of vices, clamps, and syringes displayed on a metal tray. They remind

Marlene of the torture devices she saw once in a touristy museum in Niagara Falls. There

is a black chair on wheels, a folding chair, and the exam table with a piece of roughly torn wax paper haphazardly drawn across it. She knows not to choose the chair on wheels—the doctor looked at her funny last time she sat in it—but the exam table is intimidating— reclined, stirrup release mechanism exposed, ready to mount. Marlene decides to stand.

The nurse asks if anyone else will be joining her. Marlene shakes her head.

“Take your pants and panties off and have a seat on the table. There is a sheet in the cabinet if you want to cover up. The doctor will be here in a couple of minutes. Any questions?”

Marlene does have a lot of questions. She wonders where women put their underwear, whether she should put her legs up after the procedure, whether any of this is a good idea.

“No, I don’t have any questions right this second,” Marlene says. The nurse leaves, and Marlene fetches one sheet, and then another one for good measure, from the cabinet.

***

Marlene had emailed Wags and told him to meet her at the Food Court in the

Westgate Mall. She considered dimly lit coffee shops, an independent bookstore, a picnic table at the park, but she figured a place with a lot of exits and constant background noise would prove helpful if their meeting was a disaster. Or worse, a prank.

But Wags replied that the Food Court would be fine, and how would he know who she was? Marlene replied with a basic description (shoulder length brown hair, short, smiley—should she say smiley?) and that she would be alone, sitting close to the Chicken

Shack. “I will order a kid’s meal and an extra-large Diet Coke to be conspicuous,” she wrote, although this might have been what she would have ordered anyway.

She spent an hour trying on outfits. Most of her clothes were from TJ Maxx, greys and blacks, nothing low-cut or tight enough to reveal her midsection. She selected a light grey sweater and the jeans that made her rear look the smallest. She dug a green silk scarf that June had given her out of her bottom drawer, removed the tags, and tied it around her neck, unsure of the proper method. She tried a knot and a bow before removing it entirely and choosing a thick gold plated necklace from her small jewelry box. She considered briefly whether snake-like gold chains were still in style, and then fastened it around her neck.

She arrived at 9:50am, and the Chicken Shack was serving breakfast. She did not consider that they would not be serving Kid’s Meals yet. She asked for an egg and cheese sandwich on a chicken flavored biscuit, an extra large coke, and a Kid’s Club meal bag, turning around as if to keep a watchful eye on the tot playing with the straw dispenser. She felt her face turn red. The teenager behind the counter shrugged and gave her an empty Kids Club bag and a tiny stuffed walrus toy wrapped in plastic with several suffocation warning messages emblazoned on it.

Marlene put her items on a red tray and sat at the table closest to the Chicken

Shack register. She took out a blank sheet of graph paper and a sharpened pencil for note

taking. She ate most of her sandwich, wiped her face and fingers with a napkin, and looked around for Wags. She tried not to look at her watch. 10:12, 10:15, 10:17.

Then she saw him. A cute, young-looking college boy with scruffy blond hair, long around the ears, a slight beard, and a ruddy, but nice looking face. He looked lost as he surveyed the food court. Marlene resisted the temptation to yell “over here!” Instead, she reached for the stuffed, bagged walrus toy and waved it high in the air.

Wags saw the beacon and walked over. He began talking a few yards before he reached the table.

“Dude! I am, like, so sorry I’m late. My alarm! That thing is crap-ola,” he said as he approached her.

Marlene was stuck on “dude,” working to remember the rest of what he said. He reminded her of a surfer, plucked from the ocean by a hawk and dropped off in Charlotte, four hours inland. He wore an orange plaid short-sleeved button down shirt with a logo stitched on the pocket, cargo shorts, flip-flops. He had a pair of aviator sunglasses peeking out of his shirt pocket. He looked like a normal college kid. Normal was good.

Normal was unbelievable, she thought.

She had imagined her respondent, the potential father of her child, would have been the type of guy she hung out with in high school—a band kid who played a reed instrument, someone who was a Grand Master in Dungeons and Dragons, a middle-class boy with bad teeth that his parents didn’t see the point in fixing. But this guy was attractive. One of the popular kids, probably. Marlene found herself worrying about her gray hairs and whether they were illuminated by the Food Court lighting high overhead.

She stood and held out her hand. He leaned his whole body across the table. His hand was warm, his grip tight.

“What up?” he said. Marlene’s mind raced. She wondered if “how’s it hanging?” was something the kids still said.

“So, it’s Wil, then?” she asked. “I’m Marlene.” She liked how he looked at her eyes and not the rest of her body.

“Oh, it’s whatever, m’am. Wil is cool. Or Wags. My full name is sort of embarrassing.”

“I won’t judge. I never liked Marlene.”

“It’s, okay, are you ready for this?” He brushed away his hair, which was just long enough to hang in his eyes.

Marlene nodded. This was a good ice breaker, she thought.

“My name is Wilton Agnes Godfrey the fifth, so some kids back in prep started calling me Wags. You know, my initials. The five is kinda like an S, you know? You pickin’ up what I’m layin’ down?”

Marlene chuckled nervously. She was picking it up.

Wags pulled out his chair. She was glad he was going to sit. She felt less fat when she sat. She cleared her throat.

“Well, then, Wags, let me start by thanking you for responding to my ad. I had several responses, but I thought I would start by meeting you.” Carol had told her to say this, to play a little coy, a little hard to get. “This isn’t a trip to the butcher, Marl,” Carol had said. “You aren’t picking out a rack of lamb.”

Marlene cleared her throat again. “So, again, thank you for responding,” she repeated. Wags smiled and nodded and put his hands on the table, thumbing the corner like it was a drum. She worried this was a clandestine move to look at his watch, but he seemed to be looking at her.

“Let’s get to it then, shall we?” she asked.

“We shall,” he said.

She took out a pencil and asked him if he’d mind if she took some notes while he answered her questions.

“No way, man. I totally get why you’d want to do that. I’m unflappable. That’s the right word, right? Unflappable. I like the sounds of that word, unflappable, as in not able to be flapped. Like penguin wings, man. I’m unflappable like penguin wings.” He beamed, exposing perfectly aligned teeth. The teeth distracted her from focusing on whether her potential sperm donor might be a bit of a pothead or a little bit of a nitwit. A very cute nitwit.

They spoke while Marlene took notes. She drew a rough table on the graph paper while he answered her questions. She wrote “Things we know about Wags” at the top.

Family Parents divorced. Mom left when he was thirteen and got remarried to a hippie out in Santa Cruz who owns a beet stand at the Farmer’s Market. Dad in Charleston. Only child. Schooling Elementary school  in Charleston, SC boarding school in Boston (after mom left) one year at College of Charleston,  bad grades graduating from UNC-C in May, major: nutrition. Reasons for helping “respects” motherhood “has the goods” me Family used to have money, but his dad is being sued over a bad real estate transaction. Said he could use the cash Goals/Ambits. To own huge fitness chain, or be astronaut, or something else [illegible]

Pros Cute, friendly, athletic (played lacrosse)

Cons Was late to our meeting. Words: use of “dude,” “get my drink-on,” compounding words like fund-age (as in, he could use the “fund-age.”) Confusing manner of conversation.

She asked him if he was a leader or follower. He talked about the parties at his fraternity, the mixer that weekend, the band they had coming. She had been right—he was one of the popular kids. He was the kind of guy whose schedule she would have memorized in college and he never would have noticed her. She perked up when he said he was treasurer of Phi Beta something.

“So you are good with numbers, then?” she asked, interrupting him.

“Dude, no way. All you need is a little Microsoft Money and you are well, money. I could train my monkey to use that computer program,” he said.

“You have a monkey?” she asked.

He chuckled.

“I see,” she said.

“I’m not a math guy, but I like to read. Reading rocks. Take a look, it’s in a

book. That’s my mantra. Creighton, Koontz, Patterson, PD James, all the classics.”

Marlene took some solace in the fact he could read. She could always teach the child how to add. She could pay for a tutor. She couldn’t pay for a nice jaw line.

She asked him if he had any questions for her. She had prepared answers to potential questions on the last sheet of graph paper:

--Can I get pictures of the child at Christmas? (Yes, she could arrange that.)

--Can I visit at Christmas? (She’d prefer not.)

--What if the insemination doesn’t work? (She wasn’t sure.)

--Do you want my medical history? (Counter question: Do you have a poor medical history?)

--Are you going to require anything from me in the future? (Nope, nothing, never.)

Wags looked at her with big green eyes.

“Naw, I don’t have any questions. I’m probably supposed to ask you if you are gonna be a good mom and stuff, but you know, here you are sitting at a Chicken Shack with a guy you don’t even know just so you can get some sperm, when really, you can get that pretty much anywhere for free, so you must be really interested in being a mom, and

I dig that. My mom sucked. Just don’t suck as a mom. And no pressure naming the kid

Wags the sixth, although just Six would be kinda cool. Your last name’s Duffy? Six

Duffy. Awesome name.” Awful, she thought, but she smiled. She liked him for asking if she’d be a good mother. What an inspired comment from a cute kid, she thought. She

felt her heart race a little.

“I promise not to be a bad mom,” Marlene said solemnly, the words feeling like a deep promise, a commitment, sort of like a marriage vow. Few married people probably made such tender pledges, certainly not on a first date, she thought. She wondered what kind of girl Wags himself would marry someday, a pretty southern blonde probably, maybe a mean girl, and she felt a twinge of jealousy in her chest.

She had one more question for him, the most important question on the sheet, the one with highlighted stars next to it.

“Would you say you are a kind person?” she asked as she brushed biscuit crumbs off the table onto the floor.

Wags thought about it for a second. Marlene studied his face. He looked kind.

Aloof, but kind, she thought.

“I would say that’s an affirmative. Let me give you an example.”

“Please do,” she said.

“My roommate at UNC-C. He’s a big, fat Japanese guy. Name’s Masato Sato, lives in Cali. We just call him Sato. We got matched together freshman year and lived together ever since. He has a painting scholarship because he’s dirt poor but a really excellent painter—he makes these psycho-looking still-lifes. They are like Japanese anime that’s on crack and has a baby with one of those Impressionists you see at the museum. You know what I am talking about?”

Marlene had no idea what he was talking about, but she nodded and took a sip from her straw.

“Sato is a huge dude, like a sumo wrestler.” He put his arms out to the side to show his girth. “Anyhoo, he has no place to go for Thanksgiving our sophomore year, so

I call my dad and tell him that I’m bringing my roommate home and can he tell Maggie, his maid turned girlfriend, to get a big honking turkey.” Wags clasped his hands together and made a wide circle with his arms. Marlene felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She wished for a second that she were in that circle.

“So I bring Sato home, and dad takes one look at him and tells me to meet him in his study. I know where this is going, but I follow him, and he gives me an earful about the old Godfrey plantation—which isn’t really around anymore, in case you were wondering—we live on an acre or two and the rest is all built up into condos that are now sinking into the bog because the land wasn’t filled in right, and yada yada. Anyway, he says how a “Jap” has never sat at the Godfrey’s table, and my grandpa would roll in his grave if he knew we had “an oriental” in our house, and did I bring Sato home to sit at the table or would he help slice food with Maggie in the kitchen?” Marlene gasped. Wags made dramatic motions with his hands: air-quotation marks, a slap on the table, a violent pointing motion when he got to the last part.

“No way,” she gasped and leaned forward. She felt like she was gossiping with

Carol.

“I mean, can you believe that shit? I tell my dad that the war has been over for like one hundred years and Sato is my friend, and Sato will eat next to me, and me next to him, and if he doesn’t like that, then I was going to head back to school and not come home for Christmas.” Wags leaned back. He’s sort of heroic, Marlene thought.

“Then what?” she asked, on the edge of her seat. She put her hand down on the blue laminate table, and knocked up the edge of the red tray and the greasy last bite of her sandwich fell against her sweater, leaving a mark. Wags didn’t bat an eye.

“And then my dad gets all fiery red like he gets sometimes,” Wags said, pointing to his face.

“Did Sato have to eat in the kitchen?” Marlene asked.

“Well, my dad came around eventually. Sato sat at the far end of the table. Dad didn’t say a word to him though.” Marlene shook her head sympathetically.

“Maggie’s turkey was pure awesomeness that night though.”

“I see.” Marlene furrowed her brow.

“So I think that story shows that I am kind. Defending Sato and Sato’s honor during our Thanksgiving,” he said, shrugging.

Marlene nodded, processing the fact that her child’s father might be a crusader, but his grandfather was a huge racist. Wags interrupted her thought.

“I mean, my dad’s not terrible. He’s just, well, from a different era. He’s very white and very southern, and he’s used to being waited on by a sort of underclass. He doesn’t have hired help anymore, or much land, or any family money, and it’s left him a little empty. He fills that emptiness with anger and a healthy side of—what’s the word for people who don’t like outsiders, spelled with an x, sounds like a z… --xenophobia.

He’s got a little of that.”

“It doesn’t seem genetic, I guess.” Marlene said.

“It isn’t,” Wags replied. When he smiled, his left cheek dimpled and his face

blushed. He had the type of pinkish undertone skin that easily flushed with a stiff drink or a flight up a long set of stairs, and Marlene wondered how it would mix with her more yellow-green tint, the by-product of a Greek grandfather, a Polish grandma, and not a lot of time in the sun. It might work out well.

“So, if you pick me, what do I need to do? I mean, I know how to DO it, obviously, but how do I get my little Wagsters to you? I have a car. But if you are interviewing a whole bunch of people, that’s cool. Just let me down easy.” He laughed.

“No, no, I want you,” Marlene said. She felt her face get hot as she said these words. “I want to hire you, I mean.” For a split second she thought about asking him, jokingly at first to gauge his response, whether he’d just give her his sperm the old- fashioned way.

“Not to be a total douchebag,” he said, interrupting her bawdy thoughts. “But do you pay me before or after I do the deed?”

Marlene felt the air leave her chest. That’s right, she reminded herself. Business transaction. He has something I want. I am paying him for sperm.

“You know, I can pay you more. Double, even. I think that amount I put in the paper was just to see if people would be interested.” She hadn’t planned on saying this, or paying this, but the words spilled out.

“Ah, the old bait and switch,” he said.

“Sort of,” Marlene said. For the first time in her adult life, she understood how smart girls fell for less-smart guys. There was something captivating in both their naivety and their dimples.

Marlene described the sperm collection process without using words like

“period,” “ejaculate,” or “ovulate,” as she had practiced. He seemed a little confused.

She rephrased.

“Bottom line is that I will contact you the day before they need the specimen.

You will take this cup, do your business in it, and get in a car and drive immediately to the North Mecklenburg County Medical Center, building two, basement Andrology lab.

I have it all written down for you here. Any questions?” she asked.

“The money,” Wags said. “Again, not to be an ass, but I get that when? My cell bill was mad high last month, so I am just trying to figure out…”

“Oh yes, yes. Here, here,” she said, reaching into her purse. “Here’s half now.

It’s actually what I said I’d pay you to begin with. But when you come through, I’ll get you the rest. I can use PayPal,” she said proudly.

“Come through, he he,” he laughed. “No, that’s cool. Super cool that you are hooking me up with the extra funds, too.”

Her heart beat fast. This is what a John must feel like, she thought. She was the world’s first female, virgin John, buying not sex, but sperm from a kid she had a little crush on.

She put the plastic cup, with its metal lid and typed information sticker with her name, DOB and identification number on top of the instruction sheet and slid it across the table. A janitor emptied the trashcan a few feet away and bumped their table slightly as he heaved the bag from the receptacle. The plastic cup tipped over and began to roll.

Wags reacted, catching it before it fell to the floor. Ah, Marlene thought. Quick hands.

She wished again for a second that those hands would hold hers so she could feel their warmth, assess if they were was rough or smooth. But she settled for a handshake, a long look, and a quick good-bye.

***

The speculum feels cold, smooth and a little pinchy on its way inside her. She isn’t surprised. She’s read in magazines like Glamour that sex hurts sometimes.

“Just relax,” the doctor says. “We’ve got some different size equipment here, so it’s a little bit of a guessing game.” Marlene winces as he opens the speculum. She raises her head to see the doctor’s bald head between her knees.

He goes about the procedure, informing Marlene of every step (“now I am going to wash your cervix,” “now I am threading the catheter,” “now we are loading the specimen.”) Silence would have been okay with her.

“OK, we are ready for the insemination, Ms, Ms…” he looks over his shoulder at the folder next to the sink.

“Duffy,” Marlene says.

“Ah, yes, sorry. You are my fourth insemination this morning. Alright, Ms.

Duffy. You won’t feel a thing here.”

Marlene takes a deep breath and is afraid to let the air out. She sees his arm move slightly as he pushes the syringe, but she feels nothing.

“And we’re done.” The speculum slides out, and she feels moisture. She panics.

Did they swim out already? She doesn’t want to speak out of fear of alarming the sperm.

“Now, take it easy today—don’t go running any marathons on me this afternoon.

Tomorrow go about your normal day. Two weeks from tomorrow, if you haven’t menstruated, I want you to take a pregnancy test. You call us if the result is positive and we’ll get you back in here for blood work.”

“Okay,” Marlene says, still holding some of her breath. She can feel her face getting red.

“You are welcome to take your time getting up, but we will need the room in ten minutes or so for another patient. Don’t worry, they won’t fall out. The girls always worry that they are going to fall out, but you could do a hundred jumping jacks right now and it probably wouldn’t make a bit of difference. Those sperm swim upstream, no problem. Think of all those girls who don’t even know they are pregnant and go out and party all night.” The doctor smiles, grabs her file, and closes the door behind him. Yeah, she thinks. Think of those girls, those friends of Wags, probably.

***

Fifteen days later, on a Sunday morning, Marlene awakes with abdominal pain, a pinching, almost. She thinks she has gas.

She grabs a just-bought pregnancy test from the medicine cabinet on her way to the bathroom. She rips off the wrapper and holds the white stick with her thumb and

forefinger, pinky out, like it’s a delicate wand. She spreads her legs so she can see what she’s doing, peeing slowly so as not to soil her hand. She places the wet stick on top of the toilet as she reads the directions. Wait six minutes, it says. What to do for six minutes, she wonders. She thinks of the longest song she can think of and starts singing

“American Pie.” “Well, I know that you're in love with him, ‘cause I saw you dancin' in the gym. You both kicked off your shoes…”

She sings for a couple of minutes, tapping her foot the porcelain tile around the toilet. The test beckons her. She turns around and looks at it, squinting so she can’t read the result. Nah, she thinks, I can wait two more measly minutes. “Now the half-time air was sweet perfume, while the Sergeants played a marching tune, we all got up to dance,

Oh, but we never got the chance…”

Best to stop the song before they start talking about the Devil, she thinks. She picks up the stick, by the wet end accidentally.

The second line is there. It’s positive. She emits a small yelp and wipes her wet fingers on her pants. She thinks for a second of young Wags, what he might be doing right then. The thought makes the small hairs on the back of her neck stick up. She wonders when she should call Carol. She can wait until she asks, she figures, keep this secret to herself for a bit.

She stands and does a giddy dance next to the toilet. She looks at the test—it still reads positive. She feels an energy pulsing through her body and contemplates what to do for the rest of her day.

Perhaps she will spend the morning knitting Baby Gracie a proper baby hat—pink

and white stripe with a big tassel. Maybe she will knit two while she is at it. Then she could take the hat over at lunchtime, visit Baby Gracie, see if her parents need help watching her while they do whatever it is they do. Then around dinner or a little before, she might take a walk around UNC-C, not where Wags’ dorm is exactly, but somewhere close by, a block or two away. If she happens to run in to him, say, just by coincidence, by accident, really—the way you bump into an old acquaintance or a friend of a friend— she could tell him hello. She could tell him what she now knows.

***

There is a story Marlene will never know. On the morning of her insemination,

Wilton Agnes Godfrey the Fifth awoke with a killer headache after a late night out with the Delta Zeta debutantes. Upon hearing his drilling alarm, he leaned over the bunk, his head heavy with DZ party punch, to awake Masato Sato, to whom he promised $100, if he would “do him a solid.” Wags pointed to the plastic cup on his desk and told Sato to take it, work his magic in it, and drive it down to the hospital. He thought the lab might be in the basement—the instructions were under his homework for his “Social and

Cultural Aspects of Food” class. Sato, desperate for cash, lumbered out of bed in his boxers, asked no questions, took the cup, and stepped over two empty pizza boxes on his way to the door and the communal bathroom down the hall.

Then Wags, his head clearing briefly, thought about the implications of that particular moment’s laziness, of the pitiable woman with the stuffed animal at the

Chicken Shack, of the strong jawline, albeit flawed legacy, of the Godfrey men. He considered the pretty girl he met at the party the night before, the one who read his palm, tracing his lines with her manicured finger like she was reading rivers on a map. She had told him he had a weak head line, broken in many places, branching in the wrong spots, feathered, brittle, and weak. But she had said that he had a strong love line, deep and long, interwoven with his life line. “You’ll make all the wrong decisions, but you’ll love the decisions you make,” she had said. He didn’t remember much from the night before, but that line had stuck with him and echoed through his hollow head.

And so Wags sat up, letting his pinching headache throb for a few seconds before swinging his legs over the side of the bed, jumping down, and chasing down Sato before he defiled the cup, before he changed his mind.

MISCONCEPTIONS

Pre-conception, April 2009

“It’s nice isn’t it?” I said to my husband Jake a few weeks after Sam was born.

We were sitting on the new sectional sofa and watching television after dinner. Sam was asleep in his portable crib, which, back then, was always within view. “It’s nice not stressing each month about getting pregnant. Even if we had trouble getting pregnant again, it shouldn’t be the same degree of worry, now that we have him, you know?”

“Definitely,” Jake said. “But it’s kind of messed up, isn’t it? Looking at having a kid as being the end of a journey. Birth is, by definition, the beginning, right?” He asked this in his probing, rhetorical question voice as he grabbed the remote control. He smiled. “But mostly, I’m just glad you are done writing about my defective sperm. I was getting sick of stories about people that resemble me jacking off in plastic cups at the doctor’s office. A guy can get a complex about that stuff,” he said, laughing a little.

I stood up to see the gentle rise and fall of Sam’s chest across the room. I was glad I had a chronicle of the fertility treatments we had gone through to conceive Sam.

Every ovulation test, plastic cup, poke and prod had led to him, and I had a lot of it written down. A prequel to his life.

A year later, I was pregnant again. That pregnancy has a prequel too.

Conception, April 2010

After three diaper changes, four hundred eighty-seven miles, and one pit stop for an emergency pair of control-top Spanx, we pull into the Hampton Inn just off the interstate. The hotel sign taunts, “It’s been ten years, Class of 2000!”

We’re exhausted. But Sam has been napping in his car seat since Virginia, thereby eliminating the chance of a family siesta. There is really no time for napping anyway. I have classmates to awkwardly hug in the hotel lobby, the porta-crib to set up, a baby to feed, and Jake’s button-down to iron before the onslaught of happy hour, dinner, the after party, hugs, kisses, and “What do you do? Oh really? That’s fantastic.

Please tell me more,” banter.

I have been dreading this weekend. My best friend talked me into coming (if you don’t go to this reunion, you’ll never go to any), and I had reluctantly agreed.

It wasn’t like I hated college. I went to a great liberal arts school that northerners have never heard of. The campus is beautiful. Montecello-inspired buildings with second story verandas and historical plaques line the brick sidewalks connecting the small Mayberry-esque town to the college campus of 1600 students. The student body is composed of smart kids who couldn’t get into Princeton, wealthy debutantes from

Charleston, jocks who couldn’t play Division I at a larger school, Midwestern high

school salutatorian types looking to migrate south, and about five gay kids. What it lacked in diversity it made up for in southern hospitality— classes in professors’ family rooms, a free laundry service, an honor code that made it okay to leave your computer overnight in a library carrel and your dorm room door unlocked. It was a fine place to spend four years. But it was also okay not to come back for ten.

Jake asks if he should make a run to the liquor store. At home, we drink beer.

Yes, I tell him, absolutely, hell yes. Indecisive as always, he returns with a two-liter of

Diet Coke and an assortment of airplane-sized liquor bottles, their necks poking out of the brown paper sack. He dumps them out on the floor between our double beds (the price you pay for waiting until the last minute to make a hotel reservation) before I have a chance to redirect him. Sam picks up a bottle of Crown Royale and shakes it like a rattle.

Crown and Coke it is. I take my butter yellow dress (carefully chosen from dozens at the outlet mall) out of the garment bag, remove the tags, turn on the shower, and hang it in the hot steam. I open a new tube of mascara and fire up the curling iron, which emits a foul, burned hair smell from years of disuse. Who are you primping for,

Jake asks, as I clear the foggy mirror. Fair question, but I respond by closing the bathroom door. This must be done. I have some more Crown (easy on the Coke, please, dear) and begin to tweeze, pick, lotion, and schlack. I can hear Jake dole out instructions to our two babysitters—Sarah, Jake’s twenty-seven year old sister from nearby Charlotte, and Aaron, her live-in boyfriend, a quiet guy who always wears those slip-on shoes that are supposed to look like cowboy boots. Jake is addressing most of the directions to her.

Tabs for the diaper go in the front. Bedtime at eight. Give him a lollipop if things go

south.

I kiss Sam on the top of his fuzzy head. He cries, knowing that his mother— almost unrecognizable in her make-up and a dress—is leaving him in the Hampton Inn with Johnny cowboy shoes and a couple of lollipops. I take a picture of him with Jake’s phone. The thought of sharing this picture with my friends makes me a little giddy. On one hand, I can’t believe I have joined the ranks of people who pass around pictures of their kids. On the other, I couldn’t be more proud of this pudgy, blond hair, blue-eyed creation.

It’s raining. Although I brought a variety of emergency items on this trip (first aid kit, safety pins, various disinfectants), I have no umbrella or raincoat. No matter how close Jake pulls the car to the gymnasium, the butter yellow dress is no match for an

April evening North Carolina downpour. My dress clings and my hair falls. My pretty classmates saunter by with Burberry trench coats and umbrellas, and I gallop like an injured gazelle toward the door. The three and a half drinks have at least numbed some of the self-consciousness.

The gymnasium is a mix of formal and cheap: white linens on fraternity beer pong tables, pigs-in-a-blanket on silver serving trays, red and black paper napkins stuck to sweating wine glasses. Jake, raised in Nebraska with friends named Billy and “Red,” is confused by the dizzying array of seersucker pants, pink golf shirts, and nametags that read things like Bentley McFudden IV or Mary Spenser Pruett Cabot Clark. Girls I would never have hugged back in college kiss me on the cheek, “Hellllooo!” they say in syrupy southern drawls. I smile, kiss back. You do these sorts of things here.

I am uncomfortable in my damp dress—I had been worried it was too short, but now I think it might not be short enough. I grab a glass of white wine from the waiter’s tray.

Slideshow from our freshman year. Look, there, it’s me in the middle—tan legs in white jean shorts, long blonde hair, pre-coffee addict white teeth. And while it isn’t a total disaster now, there are the obvious changes—mom hair, crow’s feet, the fifteen pounds gained later that year that never went away. A glass of red, please. A speech by the college president who says tuition for the class of 2030 will cost $141,000 a year if we don’t give more money to the Annual Fund tonight. Glass of white. A too long conversation with the ex-high school boyfriend, the one who followed me to college and then dumped me for one of my friends, who is now his wife. Switch back to red.

I wake up naked in one of the double beds at the Hampton Inn. Jake is in the other bed. Sam is nowhere to be found. I panic. Someone stole the baby, I yell at Jake.

He groans and rolls over. No Jake, really, this is serious, wake up now. Calm down, he says, Sam’s in his crib in the bathroom. You thought it was a great idea last night, don’t you remember? Something about him needing the dark and the noise from the bathroom exhaust fan. Geez, you were hammered last night, hon. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Balled up between the beds is the butter yellow dress, wet from wine and rain.

misconception one (your husband will get the message)

My period is late, but I attribute it to the running and weaning. I am running in a manner than no one should ever run: no weekday training or warm-ups, six or seven milers on Saturday and Sunday, poor footwear. I am training for a half-marathon with a friend who lost a hundred pounds in the last year; it is a complete “if she can do it” scenario, but the truth is, I can’t. I throw up after my runs, my knees hurt, my back aches.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early May, I put Sam down for an afternoon nap and ransack the bottom drawer in our bathroom. There is a lifetime’s worth of fertility paraphernalia in here: ovulation tests, unused syringes, half-empty bottles of estrogen, progesterone, anti-coagulants, an ovulation watch, two broken basal body thermometers,

Tylenol 3, a well-worn copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility, a $160 fertility monitor I intended to sell on ebay. At the bottom I find what I have been looking for, a barely expired First Response pregnancy test. I take it to the toilet.

The two lines show up right away, no mistaking them. In former days, I would squint and stare at these pregnancy tests, tilt them this way and that, pray for a second line that never appeared. But this line is there, bright and pink. No way.

I wake Sam from his nap, load him into the car, and head for the outlet mall. I consider the cheesy “I’m Gonna Be A Big Brother” t-shirt, but decide on a white long sleeve hoodie with a red dragonfly emblazoned on the front, size 3T, something to grow into-- for next Spring, perhaps. And I buy a newborn-sized onesie with the same hand-

drawn red dragonflies. Their first matching outfits. Perfect. I wrap them up in tissue paper and put them on the island in the kitchen.

“Look what I bought today,” I say to Jake before he has a chance to change out of his steel-toed boots. He manages a warehouse for ten hours a day, and he comes home gritty, tired, and hungry.

“What is it?” he asks, looking at the bag on the kitchen island.

“Just open it.”

He takes both items out of the tissue paper and looks at them.

“Nice,” he says. He starts to put them back in the bag.

“You didn’t even look at them.”

“Yes, I did. I said they’re nice.”

“Well, what else do you think about them?”

“I think they are good. What’s for dinner?”

“Will you take two seconds to look at them? What do you see?”

“I see a shirt for Sam with another shirt to go underneath it. I like them.”

“What do you see when you look at the onesie?”

“I see insects. Does Sam still wear onesies?”

“Does it look small to you?”

He holds up them up. The onesie is a quarter of the size of the hoodie.

“Yeah, this one looks a little small.” He dangles the onesie.

“What size is it?” I ask.

“The tag says newborn.”

“What do you think about that?”

“You got the wrong size. Why are you being weird?” he asks.

“I didn’t get the wrong size.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Think about it for two seconds.

“Oh my god, you are kidding.”

misconception two (what’s written on the back of an envelope, May 28, 2010)

Refill prenatal vitamins Clip diaper coupons (all szs) Call OB for 8-week appt Buy saltines and Sprite Return wine TUMS

Charlotte, Clementine, Julia, Elizabeth, Stella, Madeline, Josie (Josephine=yuck?), Clara Andrew, Harrison, Cole, Henry, Dexter, Stuart, James, Thomas [Middle name: Lincoln?]

misconception three (your husband doesn’t need to come to the eight week ultrasound)

The second floor corridor of the family health center contains the fertility clinic, ultrasound center, obstetrics, and pediatrics. It’s a progression that is only painful, or even noticeable, when you start at the beginning.

The ultrasound center sees both fertility and pregnant patients, but the infertiles sit

in their own waiting room. It’s better this way. No infertile should be subjected to

Parents magazine while she waits to have her failing ovaries assessed or made to watch a cranky nine month pregnant women waddle by with her fidgety two and four year olds in tow. I always preferred the sequestration.

But today, I’m not an infertile or even a pregnant fertility patient. I’m sort of normal. I pick up Parents magazine and flip to an article about tantrums. This is actually quite relaxing. Sam is home with a sitter. Normally, it would be my mom, but we’ve decided to keep this pregnancy a secret until my mom’s birthday at the end of June, when

I hit the twelve-week mark. She’ll be shocked. We love surprises.

Jake had wanted to come but couldn’t miss work. The first time around, he never, ever would have missed this appointment. But we’ve done this before. I have it covered.

I’ll get an ultrasound photo. There isn’t much to see at the almost eight week mark anyway—a small flicker of the heart, a tiny ball the size of a kidney bean. He’ll be here for the next one, when we get to hear the heartbeat. Everything is fine, anyway—I throw up in the morning, crave bananas in the afternoon—these are signs that everything is okay. I’m pretty sure everything is fine.

An ultrasound tech I have never seen calls my name, escorts me to the dimly lit ultrasound room, and tells me to take off my pants and wait for Marsha.

Ah, Marsha. We go way back.

Some gals have a close, or shall I say intimate, relationship with their ultrasound tech. Marsha’s my special girl.

I used to think the worst part of an obstetric ultrasound might be the coldness of

the ultrasound gel or the farting noise it made coming out of the tube. These are the fears of a woman not acquainted with the internal ultrasound wand, known as the “dildo cam” to the fertility challenged, who have had relations with the wand in any number exams and procedures. The dildo cam is exactly what it sounds like-- a phallic camera, a penisy picture taker. I’ve had relations with it dozens and dozens of times over the years. For an encore, it also makes an appearance at the first pre-natal appointment, when the baby is too small to be seen on an external ultrasound.

Marsha keeps her dildo cam in a holster underneath the exam table next to a red bin of condoms. I know this because a couple of years ago, bored by the in-room magazine collection, I hopped down off the exam table, my rear exposed in the paper dress, and looked at the box of condoms to see if they were really run-of-the-mill condoms or special, medical, ultrasound wand condoms. I had found they were regular condoms in white plastic wrappers, the unlabeled kind like the ones they gave out at the college health center, from back in a time when we all thought we were one broken condom away from a screaming baby.

Marsha enters. She smiles like she might remember me. If not, the thud of my file against the linoleum counter tells her I’ve been here before. She enters my name into the computer and the date of my last period, and although she doesn’t draw attention to it, the baby’s due date automatically populates a field on her screen. January 14, 2011.

I commit that date to heart.

misconception four (Mom will know just the right thing to say)

Christmas, 2008. We sit on sofas and folding chairs around the artificial tree. It’s the first year we haven’t had a real one, but at twenty-four weeks pregnant, I had been too tired to talk Jake out of the Home Depot version of Christmas. It’s the whole family— me, Jake, my brother, my mom, and her parents. No aunts and uncles on my mom’s side because she is an only child, stranded by my grandmother’s recurrent miscarriages, which are spoken of only when conversation turns dark, dour. This means it comes up fairly often.

My pregnancy is going well—the baby kicks, our crib is ordered, my wedding ring no longer fits my swollen fingers. Under the artificial tree are wrapped gifts with a definite theme. There are pictures of our ultrasounds in silver frames, a grandparent survival kit from the clearance section of Babies R Us, a great-grandma ornament, a couple of toys, clothes, and a blanket for the baby.

“Wait,” Mom says after all the gifts are opened. “The biggest present is in the garage.” Dad opens the door and wheels in a stroller. It’s the red one we wanted, adorned with a big Christmas-y plaid ribbon. Cheers, ooo’s, and ahhh’s. Just what we wanted.

Christmas dinner is over. Mom and I are washing china, piece by piece, in hot, sudsy water. I wash; she dries. We discuss the doneness of the turkey, Christmases past, favorite gifts. I say thanks for the stroller. This reminds her of something. She goes to her purse on the desk and takes out a small, folded piece of paper. I reach for it with a wet, yellow latex gloved hand. What’s this, I ask. She puts her hand on my shoulder.

“It’s the receipt for the stroller. You know, in case something happens. You just never know, dear.”

misconception five (doctors understand)

Back in the ultrasound room. Marsha has a gentle demeanor, and more importantly, a gentle touch.

Let’s see what we have here, she says. She removes the wand from its holster and takes a condom out of the bin. This all sounds dirty, but she’s coy. It’s not like she’s smoking a Virginia Slim and ripping the condom open with her teeth while lesbian porn music plays in the background. She’s classy and quiet, and lucky for both of us, the dildo cam is not very well endowed.

I know right away that it isn’t good.

I’m not saying that I could walk into an ultrasound clinic today, tell the techs and doctors to go home, and do their jobs for them—there are way too many buttons on those machines—but after dozens of ultrasounds and a lot of googling, I know the basics of what should be present at an eight week ultrasound.

Three things. Sac. Heartbeat. Teeny-tiny arm and leg buds on a little kidney bean.

When there is only a sac, there is a problem.

Marsha doesn’t say anything. She just roots around with her wand. Sometimes

babies hide. But to me it is clear—a big, black sac in the middle of my gray uterus with nothing inside. A black hole, a vortex, a blip, nothing.

“How far along are you?”

“Three days shy of eight weeks. I’m sure.”

She removes the wand and throws the condom in the trash. She takes off her latex gloves. She doesn’t look at me.

“Okay. Well, I am going to show this to the doctor and she’ll be in to review the scan with you,” Marsha says.

“There’s no baby right?

“It could just be early.”

“How early would it have to be?”

“I’m going to have to get the doctor.” She heads toward the door.

“You can tell me.”

“Maybe you are four weeks? I’m sorry. I’ll get the doctor.”

She leaves me pantless on the table.

My mind races—maybe it didn’t happen at the college reunion, maybe I was wrong and it happened more recently. But this is impossible. To have gotten pregnant two weeks ago (and therefore be four weeks pregnant) would mean I had to have sex. I hadn’t let Jake near my nauseous, tender, [pregnant] body all month.

The doctor comes in. I also know this woman. She’s old, bulky, German, and quite frankly, terrible. At my 35-week ultrasound with Sam, after emphatically telling her that we wanted to be surprised about the sex of the baby, she said, clearly through her

thick accent, “Oh, I see he’s got big hands.” Sure enough, three days later in the delivery room we heard, “It’s a boy!” Upon hearing that, my first thought was something lovely about boys, babies, and parental love. My second thought was that I would kill this woman if I saw her again.

“Zere ees no baby,” she says. “Zoo are sure zee period was eight week ago?”

I nod.

“I see zee products of zee conception, but zere ees no baby. Much blood and fluid, but zere ees no baby. You get Dee and Cee and you be done. Zoo can put on zee pants now.” I hate her.

In a “Dee and Cee” or Dilatation and Curettage, the doctor vacuums out the

“products of conception” under light anesthesia, and the miscarriage is over. It’s the same procedure as an abortion, but no one tells you that.

I go next door and talk to my OB. I don’t cry, but I clench my teeth, hard. He recommends letting nature take its course. My uterus has had its fair share of trauma already—dozens of fertility procedures, a laparoscopy, a c-section—why nick it up any more with another procedure? I don’t put up a fight. I realize I am still carrying the

Parents magazine from the lobby. I put it back, go home, and wait to miscarry.

misconception six (it’s your fault)

• What sort of introduction to the world is a belly full of Crown and Coke, cheap

wine, and, you’ve heard, shots chased with beer at the bar after the reunion? It can

drown a girl before she’s even in the pool.

• She couldn’t have liked your running, your poor, poor running routine. That

jarring, over-pronating gait, your throwing up afterwards—maybe that wasn’t

because of her but in spite of her somehow.

• Your son had jumped on you. Your 100 pound lab too. More than once, before

you found out, you had lain on the sofa and let them jump on your middle, again

and again, tickling, and rolling, and laughing.

• The universe is telling you that you are not a good enough mother. The universe

tried to make this a non-issue by not giving you a baby to begin with, but you had

to go against fate and get your son from science. You know those mornings that

you turn on Sesame Street so you can have a cup of coffee? Bad mom. And

drinking coffee to begin with? Horrible for a pregnant woman. Haven’t you read

the research? The universe doesn’t care that you didn’t know you were pregnant.

You should have known she was there.

• And then there was that thought. Remember? You know the one I am talking

about. When the second line appeared this time. It’s okay to confess it now.

That afternoon, on the toilet with the stick. C’mon, tell everyone the first thing

you thought. No, crying for joy and buying that stupid dragonfly onesie was the

second thought. Envisioning your January baby and a very pregnant you on the

Christmas card was the third thought. Your first thought was panic, remember—

deep, selfish panic. You thought about never finishing your degree, two kids in

diapers, breastfeeding again. Just because you pushed out that thought out

doesn’t mean you didn’t have it. She heard you and left.

misconception seven (you’ll never tell a stranger)

It’s been four days since the ultrasound, and I am still waiting to miscarry. The worse thing about it is that I still feel pregnant. Nauseous, hungry, bloated. I walk around the house with an industrial-sized maxi pad between my legs because I am not sure if the bleeding will begin as a trickle or a gush.

It’s hot outside, and a friend calls to see if we want to be her guests at the pool.

Sam loves the pool, but I don’t see how I can wear a bathing suit with this thing between my legs. I’m not telling her what’s happening. I’m not telling anyone, so I say we have a doctor’s appointment, which is sort of true. The doctor is making me go in for blood draws every other day to make sure my HCG, the pregnancy hormone, is going down, just in case. This all seems very pointless, confirmations of a proven bad thing, but at least it forces me to leave the house.

We get in the car for the thirty-minute drive to the lab. Sam’s fussing in his car seat. It’s Classic Rewind music hour on the radio station, and I turn up the dial to see if

he likes Tracy Chapman. He doesn’t. I pop in the Groovie Kiddie Songz CD.

At the end of our street is a library, a stoplight, and a police station, in that order.

There is no other way to leave the neighborhood. I’m on autopilot, singing, There once was a man named Michael Finnegan, he grew whiskers on his chinnegan. Sam is still crying. I am wishing they had at home blood tests that test for the pregnancy hormone so

I wouldn’t have to make these trips. My crotch is all sweaty from the hot leather seat and my giant maxi pad. I wonder if people can see its outline through the back of my shorts.

I begin to think I am on to something with the at-home blood pregnancy test idea as I pass the library.

There is a cop. I have never seen a cop here. I slam on the brakes, unsure if I was speeding. I am still singing, Shaved them off and they grew in again, poor old

Michael Finnegan, begin again. In my rearview mirror, I see the cop car pull out behind me, but not in an aggressive way. I figure he probably has somewhere to go. The light is green—I cross the intersection, and I am in front of the police station when the police car’s lights flash and the “bloot bloot” gentle siren sounds. Shit.

I pull over, more annoyed than anything. Sam’s wiggling and whining in his seat.

I turn down the music and hit my head against the headrest. I watch the cop walk up in the rear view mirror.

I roll down my window halfway. He’s cute. Not cute enough to be on a

Hollywood police drama, but cute enough to be the brother of someone on a Hollywood police drama.

“Do you know why I pulled you over, m’am?

Normally (yes, this has happened a few times before), I say no, act cool. But this is different. I can feel the telltale lump in my throat. I sniff.

Let me interrupt this for a second to say that I think it is completely unacceptable for women to cry in the face of a traffic violation. It’s embarrassing. It’s shameful. It gives women a bad name. Get pissed, get quiet, but for God’s sake, don’t cry. If you don’t want a ticket, don’t speed.

“Is everything alright, m’am?”

I shake my head no. I can feel the tears pool in my eyes against my will.

“Is there a problem?”

I nod.

He looks in the back at Sam, who is quiet now, and probably smiling at him.

“Can you tell me what the problem is?”

I shake my head no.

“M’am, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

I feel a tear slide down my cheek. I shake my head harder.

“M’am?”

“I’m fine.”

Now I am sobbing. I’m almost wailing. I can’t remember the last time I cried this hard. I didn’t cry like this when my IVF failed. I didn’t cry like this when our family dog had died. I certainly hadn’t cried like this about the miscarriage.

“M’am, can you tell me what’s the matter?”

“I’m having a miscarriage,” I say, gasping for air between each word.

“Can I get you some help?” he asks.

No. God no. I shake my head no.

“Do you need to leave?” he asks.

I shake my head no. Then nod yes. This is confusing. More sobbing.

“Do you know where your license is?”

I reach for my wallet and hand him the license. My nose is running.

“I will be back in one minute. Are you okay if I leave you for just one minute?”

I nod. Of course I’d be okay for one minute.

I wipe my tears and look back at Sam. He’s completely occupied by the sunshade and his quest to remove it from the window.

A couple minutes pass. A knock on my window. It’s the cop, and he seems to have brought another cop with him. This cop is wearing a different uniform.

“M’am, this is EMT McGraw. I dispatched him from across the street to see if he can be of any assistance.”

Oh god. No, No, No.

I imagine for a second what EMT McGraw could possibly do for me in this situation. If this were a movie, EMT McGraw and his team of EMT men would show up in an ambulance, sirens blazing, having left a real emergency to tend to a lead-footed lady on the side of the road having a miscarriage, only they don’t know that she’s not really having a miscarriage, she’s just waiting for one. The team would throw a gurney out of the back of the ambulance, and EMT McGraw would push down on a hidden lever, and when he did, secret gynecological stirrups would pop out of the bottom and maybe wrist

restraints out the side, and then EMT McGraw would yell “heave ho!” and they’d try and lift me out of my car, and if I refused, acted all crazy, they would call for back-up, because miscarriages? They involve blood, and babies, and lady parts. An unholy trifecta that should not be embellished or misconstrued in the face of a traffic ticket.

I must have looked surprised.

“M’am, EMT McGraw just walked over from the across the street to see if you needed any help.”

The station is seventy feet away, but still. I can barely muster a no.

“No, thank you.”

“Where are you off to now?” the policeman asks.

I am now acutely aware that I have been caught in a lie of sorts. I am glad Sam only knows four words: ball, bye, car, and woof.

“To the hospital,” I say. The lab is like a hospital, sort of. Patients, blood.

“Okay, then, you get there safely. I’m going to let you go with a verbal warning.

Please be careful.”

I nod, and drive off, much faster than I should.

misconception eight (things that would happen if I were in a TV movie)

• A red dragonfly lands on my windshield.

• I realize in the scheme of human losses, this one is pretty small. The worst thing

about loss is its unpredictability, and since I should predict the worst when it

comes to getting pregnant, so this, by definition, can’t be that big of a loss.

• “When You Wish Upon a Star” plays on the Groovie Kiddie Songz CD after

“Michael Finnegan,” or, if I had turned it back to Classic Rewind, “I Know

You’re Out There Somewhere” by the Moody Blues or maybe Joni Mitchell’s

“Both Sides Now.”

• The doctor’s office calls and says there was an awful mix up. The ultrasound

machine has been acting up and is not showing babies when it should.

• Sam suddenly strings his first words together and says, “It OK, Mommy.”

• The sun comes out from behind a cloud, and a sudden, inexplicable calm comes

over me, bringing with it the promise that I will have another child someday. Or,

I realize that my family is perfect as it is. I remember there was a time when I

would have died for one baby. It’s just plain greedy to want two.

misconception nine (don’t be left alone)

Ten days after my brush with the law, it begins. For two days, I sit in my bed on darkly colored flannel sheets, in pain, crying. Sam, confused, sits with me. No one calls or brings dinner of course, because I never told friends or family about the miscarriage.

Jake, my doctors, and that policeman are the only ones who know.

Jake comes home from work and scoops up Sam. “Let’s let mommy rest,” he says, closing our bedroom door behind him. I yell to Jake to put a jacket on Sam. I haven’t been outside in a couple of days but the air through my bedroom window looks crisp and chilly. They go outside to play on the swing set before the sun sets. Part of me wants to join them—this family I have, this unit that may just be complete in its current form. But I’m left alone, and somehow that feels right too.

conception, revisited.

It’s hard to write an ending to a miscarriage story. Endings are all that miscarriages ever are.

GRAVIDA

Chelli left three days ago. Her blue binder is still on the kitchen counter, next to her lipstick that looks like a bronze bullet from where I am typing this in the dining room.

Clyde says I need to commandeer the contents of the blue binder ASAP, or “a-sap” as he says it, in case I want to take action. I’m sure he’d also be interested in the bullet, if it really were one.

A word about Clyde, who has very little to do with what happened, but is the impetus behind me writing all this down. When Clyde says I need to take “action,” I am not sure if he means legal action or something else. We’ve been friends since we were in

Little League, back when he was the star slugger and I did all his homework. He defends me like he would a little brother, if he had one. Through the years, he tried to get me women, and I tried to get him good grades, and somehow he passed the Bar exam and now he defends lots of people, from their taxes mostly, but also from other things. Guys on the softball team see him about shoddy plumbing work, philandering wives, and fender benders when the other car is a nice one.

If you ask Clyde what he does, he puts on a bit of a fake Italian accent and says,

“I make problems go away.” Only he’s not Italian, he’s thin and Irish, but he has a retractable spike on his pinky ring and a lot of pent up aggression from his life as a

redhead.

When I told Clyde what happened with Chelli and the contents of the binder, he said, “Phil, you need to start writing this shit down, believe me.” I have no idea what or who to believe at this point.

(Because the things I’ve said about Clyde here might be construed as mildly incendiary, I will begin my summary of events on the next page and keep this page for my own records.)

For the last few days, I have tried to think of when I saw it all coming. Clyde would say he saw it from the start. I’m not sure about that, so I am going to try and remember the details. They come to me in waves. These are the whitecaps.

The Basket

I will to start with the basics of Chelli, BasketCase™, and how we met.

I married up. Looks-wise, at least. My wife is beautiful, thin, with long blonde hair and light green eyes. Two years ago we went to a Halloween party dressed as Vanna

White and Pat Sajack. She wore a green, slinky sequined dress, and I wore my brown suit, and we thought we would be the hit of the party, but the costumes almost weren’t costumes at all because we looked like ourselves, and I had to put on a “Hello My Name is Pat Sajack” sticker. Only then did people get it and chuckle a little. For the most part it isn’t funny when look like yourself at a dress-up party.

Chelli had been married twice before, but she claimed they didn’t count. Her first was to a drummer at age nineteen that lasted a few weeks, and her second was to an abusive pilot (Don Deckman) back when she was a flight attendant. They were married for ten years, no children, and I guess he hit her and called her names and slept around with other flight attendants.

On her resume, which was printed on lemon yellow paper and included a small fuzzy photograph, her name was Michelle Dacho-Deckman. No, I do not know why she

would have kept her married name—that hyphen part would have been easy to drop, but you don’t ask these types of things at the beginning.

I met Chelli when she interviewed in November 2007 for a job as Sales

Development Manager for my now defunct basket-and-other-home-goods company,

BasketCase™. She was sorely unqualified. But she breezed into my cramped office and took a seat on the heat register under the window instead of the chair across from my desk where the other job applicants sat, and she just sort of leaned there, smiling. She had on a black sweater with a low v-neck and a short light blue skirt that showed off her long legs and high heels. Later it would bother me a little, her insistence on heels, how they would elevate her an inch above me, but at the time, this was all very appealing.

“From the looks of this office it seems like you should be selling cars outside,” she said. “Used ones.” Those were the first things she said to me. I looked around at the wood paneling, the broken ceiling fan, the stacks of paper piled everywhere, and nodded in agreement.

I remember how she picked up a basket from a card table and pressed down on the sides and the bottom (the standards and the weavers, if I am talking shop), the way one of our quality engineers might do to test a basket’s mettle. Even under assault, I found her mesmerizing.

I launched into my script on the history of the business, which was struggling at the time but not quite dead. I explained how the land on the corner was owned by my great-grandpa and had three outbuildings and several businesses until 1992, when my uncle had an idea to start a living history museum called Colonial Colony (a terrible

name-- imagine a “Zoological Zoo” or a “Farmy Farm”) to attract visitors from the turnpike. It wasn’t successful. But he had a basket weaver and potter “on display,” dressed in ruffled shirts and three-corner hats, whose wares produced on-site couldn’t stay on our gift shop shelves. People loved handmade antique reproduction crafts in the early 90’s: mason jar candles, magazine baskets, wooden signs with semi-cryptic, churchy messages like “Wise Men Still Follow Him,” dolls with cross-stitched eyes, children’s pull toys animals from Noah’s Ark. They rubbed off the stain on the edges to make them look like antiques.

I told her how my uncle shut down Colonial Colony, fired the butter churner and the quilter and the blacksmith, and hired more basket weavers and potters, this time without costumes. Before long every building had a dozen craftsmen. I came home from grad school and took over the operations. We opened a pottery facility in East Liverpool and started peddling our stuff at in-home parties, like Tupperware. We rode the tide through the nineties, and then sometime after 2001 people weren’t as keen on spending eighty bucks on a bread basket. Home décor magazines featured stainless steel and clean lines. We moved some production to Mexico and called that line the “Heritage

Collection.” We charged half as much for a basket, but our stuff wasn’t selling, and things needed to turn around.

Chelli was sympathetic. She said she was not only interviewing for the job, she was also a customer, a fan of our mini loaf pan and Olde World Picnic Basket. I asked her what ideas she might have to develop our sales force. It was, after all, an interview.

She talked about how she had hosted several direct selling events herself—she

had invited friends over and sold candles, handbags, and even, as she put it, “lady toys” out of her apartment. She winked. I blushed. She thought the key to our success was amping up giveaways—free merchandise for women who signed on to host parties. I listened. We had tried hostess incentives, of course. We had tried everything.

“Also, you should sell a Moses basket,” she said. She went on about how she had looked through our catalog but she did not see a Moses basket, and she had friends and most of them all had kids, and they needed places for the babies to sleep. Big, expensive,

American made baby baskets might be just the thing. She commented about how our log carrying basket was a similar size, and it could be fitted with a soft fabric liner and two handles instead of one.

“And voila,” she said, outlining the shape of the basket with her arms. “The must-have shower gift item for moms everywhere.” Chelli got the job.

My relationship with Chelli intensified as our revenue stream diminished. The former masked the blow of the latter. She asked me out for drinks the night she started, and we eloped in Vegas four months later.

BasketCase™ closed production lines two months after we were married. We never made Chelli’s Moses basket en masse, just a few prototypes. Chelli helped me close the deal to sell our land and buildings to a developer who had relationships with big box retailers. We got a nice check. I gave all the employees six months salary and any merchandise they could fit in their cars. As we cleared the last few things out of the warehouse, I suppose I should have been sad looking at those unsold magazine baskets, the prototypes of pottery pieces imagined and never made. But I had a beautiful wife in

tight blue jeans, and she was better than any basket.

The Marriage

When your wife leaves you under the circumstances outlined later, it would be natural to say that things were never good. That wasn’t the case with us.

In the beginning, things were expensive, but fun. I moved out of my bachelor pad, a modest brick ranch on a few acres, and into a neighborhood with side-facing garages, heavy-duty, dark green plastic mailboxes, and electric dog fences. I paid cash for the house, and I had enough money saved to not worry about working for awhile, but not enough to retire forever, so it was just a matter of how many tennis lessons and spa days Chelli needed to rack up before I needed to pound the pavement. I wasn’t entirely henpecked—I participated, too; we took private dance lessons, ate sashimi, and went to

Hawaii. Solo, I could have lasted ten years on my nest egg. Chelli and I made it eight months before I took a job consulting for a colleague’s direct selling business, an old competitor of ours who had wisely outsourced his production earlier.

Listen, I’m not an idiot. I know Chelli liked me for my CEO status, not for my slightly jiggly middle or inability to grow much in the way of facial hair. And she liked the money, obviously. She’s not the first woman to fall for money. But when things went south with my company, she didn’t leave me. She didn’t file for divorce to get half of my check from the developer or the deed to the house. She could have done those

things. She offered to go back to flight attending, but I said no, we’d be fine. I would have flipped burgers if she asked me to.

We kissed a lot. And I was in constant awe that of all the bachelors out there— even other rich guys—she chose me.

Chelli cooked a little, hired someone to clean on Tuesdays, called me “sweetie pie,” and offered sex more often than I even cared to have it, but I mostly obliged. Prior to Chelli, I had been with four women, a paltry number, so I rounded up to ten when she asked, and I think she probably rounded down to twenty. I told her she was beautiful every morning. She didn’t complain about my annual fishing trip. She’d attend my softball games and sit by herself on one of my camping chairs while the other wives chatted about their kids and crock-pot recipes. She’d bring baby oil and grease up her thin legs in short shorts and wear big sunglasses and heels. The guys would stare. I’d get pats on the butt, jibes about how I landed her. Clyde was the only one who ever said anything critical. Early on, he pulled me aside in the dugout.

“You happy, man?”

“You bet,” I said. “Why?”

“Your wife, man. She’s hot, but I don’t know, buddy.”

“Don’t know what?”

“I’ve known you a long time. And I’ve known a lot of women,” he said.

Both of these things were true.

“And I don’t know, man. She’s hot, but…”

“But what?” I said.

“Damaged, bud. I’m getting the damaged vibe from her. I’ve met a lot of damaged women. I just want to make sure you are happy.”

Of course I am happy, I told him. I looked at her sitting in my red camping chair. She was talking on her cell phone. She looked up and waved. I smiled, waved back. Look, Clyde, I told him, you’re on deck.

Baby Talk

I was putting away hot silverware from the dishwasher and Chelli was cutting the split ends off her hair with the kitchen shears when she asked me how I felt about having a child. I remember this vividly.

“I think we should have a bunch of kids, loads of ‘em,” I said.

Truth was, I never thought I would have kids. I didn’t have an adult relationship that ever seemed headed in that direction. Then it was suddenly possible. It seemed like a second life, a reincarnation without having to die first. We had the house and the yard and the money. My mother would be ecstatic.

“We can’t have a bunch,” she said. “I’m thirty-eight. It might be too late already.”

“OK,” I said. “Two, then?”

“One,” she said. She was a little cross-eyed as she examined the ends of her hair and snipped them off, one strand at a time.

I had always wanted a sibling, but I thought perhaps she was right. We could always start with one. Go from there.

“Sounds good. Do you want to go start now?” I winked at her.

“I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she said. “I want to share my body with someone. I want to feel what that’s like, to have someone completely dependent on me for once. I don’t know what that’s like.”

“I depend on you, Chel. And you share your body with me all the time,” I said.

“Not the same thing,” she said.

I started filling the dishwasher with the breakfast dishes.

“The onus of a child falls on the mother, you know. You’ll have work, and softball games, and it’ll mostly be me and the baby all day long.”

“I suppose, but I have great memories of reading books with my dad, playing softball,” I said. She stopped what she was doing and looked at me.

“One more thing, Phil.”

“Yes?” I said.

“I would like our child to be a boy,” she said. She moved on to cutting a hangnail with the shears.

I laughed. “Well, we’ve got a fifty-fifty shot.”

She didn’t laugh. I distinctly remember her not laughing.

Mothers

I have never met my mother-in-law.

Clyde always says to get a good idea of where a woman is going to or coming from, to check out her mother. This wasn’t a possibility for me, as Chelli’s mom only came up in conversation once or twice, and only once did I press, when we were notifying our families of our engagement, and I was making phone calls.

“Should we call your mother?” I asked.

“God no. No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“She’s from hell, that’s why. I don’t even know where she is. Decaying on a beach with her fourth husband, maybe? I wouldn’t call her if I were taking my final breath.”

“You’re not, you know, embarrassed of me, are you?” I asked.

She came over and ran her long nails through my hair and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Because I get along well with mothers,” I said. “The years in the basket business gave me a lot of experience with older women. I know a lot about what makes them tick,” I chuckled. “Here, give me the phone. I’ll give her a buzz.”

Chelli suddenly snapped at me.

“Don’t pretend to know about my mother. You don’t even know the half of it.”

“I don’t know any of it,” I said. Then she started in.

“How about the part when I was eight and she’d wake me up at 5am to put my hair in hot rollers, and if the ringlets didn’t fall correctly, she would dunk my head in the sink and start again?”

Her eyes were raging, almost unrecognizable.

“What? Is that not bad enough for you? What about when I was twelve and she had eyeliner tattooed under my eyes so my make-up would be perfect? Or the twice daily supervised showers? The ones where she’d watch me wash myself and if she couldn’t do it, she would make my stepfather do it? Or the times she would slap me across the face, and when my cheeks would turn red, she’d say, ‘Ah, that’s better, you needed some color anyway.’ Or the ‘accidental’ burns from the curling iron?” She pulled up her hair and showed me white scars on her neck I always figured were birthmarks.

I shuddered and reached for her.

“Or have I told you about the calendar? It was one of those weekly chore calendars for kids. She used it to track my menstrual cycles, and on days where she figured I was ovulating, she wouldn’t let me leave the house except for school. Is this someone we want to tell about our wedding?”

“No, no,” I said. “Of course not.” That was pretty much the end of discussing her mother.

My mom is the opposite—loving, kind, supportive. Chelli met her just before our wedding. What I envisioned as mutual adoration was quickly replaced by tolerance, mostly on Chelli’s part. My mom would give Chelli a bear hug. Chelli would tap my mom’s back and pull away. My mom would ask Chelli to lunch. Chelli would decline.

My mom would call. Chelli would hand me the phone. When I asked Chelli if she liked my mom she would say, “She’s fine.” From what I understood, wives never got along with their mothers-in-law, so I chalked it up to that. But I didn’t understand how anyone couldn’t at least pretend to like my inoffensive mom, the opposite of Florida decay, a gray-haired widow one county over who owned every BasketCase™ basket we ever made and displayed them in her cramped senior apartment, the woman who inflicted no abuse except for making me attend Church camp every summer and once calling my penis a “tinkle machine” in front of my friends. My mom never said anything bad about

Chelli. She never said anything bad about anyone.

I remember telling my Chelli once how much respect I had for my mom, for everything she did for me after my dad died. “I can’t imagine what she went through when she lost him,” I said.

“She probably not as perfect as you think, Phil. I’m sure she had her secrets.” I suppose that was a weird comment, in hindsight.

The Pills

Chelli started to get serious with the baby talk. Six months ago, she visited her lady doctor, and his diagnosis was that she was “likely fertile.” I don’t know the details of this assessment. Still, Chelli said, we would need to make some major life changes to prepare our bodies to conceive our child. These preparations came as a surprise to me,

for my limited understanding was that men were virile sperm producers into their sixties, maybe seventies? Not so, said Chelli. I would need to be put on a strict diet and supplements to “optimize our chances.” She put together a blue binder filled with information on fertility and carried it around the house with her.

One day Chelli came home from the pharmacy with an oversized, green tinted

SMTWTFS pillbox with large, matchbook sized compartments filled to the brim with multicolored pills in various shapes and sizes. She handed the box to me and told me to take them. Of course I asked her what the pills were.

“Supplements,” she said. “Look, I am taking them too.” She showed me her pink pill box.

I put the two boxes next to each other. Her pills looked different than mine.

“Of course they are different,” she said. “I need good eggs, you need good sperm. Those things are different. Opposites, really.”

I asked her again what my pills were.

“Jesus, you’d think I was trying to poison you or something,” she said.

She reached for an envelope and began scrawling, from memory. I still have the list in my bedside table. It reads:

FOR PHIL Zinc 50 mg B-12 150mcg Ginseng 500mg L-arginine 500mg Vitamin E - 400iu CoQ-10 cardio formula Folic acid 800mcg Fish oil: 1000mg Penicillin

“Penicillin?” I asked.

She sighed and explained that the antibiotic would keep my sperm healthy and disease-free. I asked her if her doctor gave her a prescription for it. No, she said. But she had plenty left over from her root canal and, when that ran out, a script for

Amoxicillin from last year’s flu with one refill remaining. I couldn’t tell which pill was which.

“Just take them all, Phil,” she said.

So I did.

The Sex

Sex started to get weird around last Christmas.

From the start, Chelli would take a dominant role in bed. I liked that. Ask any guy, and any guy will tell you he likes that.

Around Christmas she told me that I needed to take a more “active” role in initiating sex. She said I needed to seduce her, woo her, be more aggressive during the act. This had come up once before, on our honeymoon, when she asked me to tie her up, and I reluctantly obliged, tying loose knots around her wrists.

“But you can only seduce me on certain days,” she said. She looked at a page in her binder.

She explained that on specific days she would be the most fertile, and she didn’t

want to waste the sperm on days when she was less fertile because at my age sperm swam more slowly anyway, and I needed to save up the best ones for when it counted.

“OK. You’ll tell me what days those are?” I asked.

She showed me a calendar with lots of chicken scratch and certain days boxed in with various colors of highlighter. Numbers, information on the moon, abbreviations like

CD4 and DPO.

“You initiate on the highlighted days,” she said. “I’ll give you a couple of days notice.” I looked at the calendar.

There were three boxed days that month, right in a row, the following Tuesday,

Wednesday, Thursday. Friday had “full moon” written on it.

“The moon? What does the moon have to do with making a baby?” I asked.

“It could mean everything,” she said.

With this much attention to detail, I assumed a pregnancy would happen pretty quickly. The first month went by. I could tell she got her period because those days were outlined in red and she wrote “Aunt Flo.” I knew what this meant without thinking too hard about it.

The Underwear

Then the lifestyle changes started. I would be taking my morning shower and

Chelli’s manicured hand would slip inside the curtain and turn down the water

temperature from hot to lukewarm. She removed the seat from my exercise bicycle and hid it in the coat closet. One morning in January my perfectly respectable Hanes were replaced with paisley boxers from Neiman Marcus. They were silky and made my balls feel weird. When I asked about these things they were all explained away, with a certain degree of anger.

“Do you want to have a baby, or don’t you?” she’d ask.

Yes, I did.

The Diet

The diet changes were the hardest. We had bananas for breakfast every morning.

I like bananas, but no one likes them every single morning. She added garlic to every dish at supper, which wouldn’t have been bad, but she also added a hefty dash of salt to everything, which was usually red meat, mushrooms, and beans, sometimes a combination of all three. I wasn’t allowed carbs. She threw out all the ice cream. She constantly made coffee and was offering it to me. She said it made the sperm swim fast.

I drew the line at the baking soda and alfalfa shakes. They tasted like, well, what you might imagine a baking soda and alfalfa shake to taste like. It bubbled and fizzed, and I tried to keep it down, but it bubbled back up and fizzled again in my mouth before I spit it into the sink.

“Try a little more each day,” she said.

“I don’t see you drinking this,” I said.

“My eggs don’t need alfalfa,” she said. “Only your old sperm do.”

The News

March 14th, lunchtime. I am at home, making a tuna salad sandwich. Chelli comes home from a morning out with her girl friends. She’s carrying the blue binder and smiling.

“So…” she says.

“So…what?” I say.

“Aren’t you going to ask me where I was?”

I tell her I know where she was, out to lunch with her girlfriends, at Chateau Elan or someplace like that.

“Don’t you want to know where I really was?”

This seemed like an odd way to reveal something truly clandestine, so yes, I told her, tell me.

“At the doctor’s,” she taunted.

“For what?” I asked.

“To confirm the pregnancy,” she said.

I think I said, “Your pregnancy?”

She probably grimaced, but all I remember was thinking my God, I am going to

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be a dad.

“Don’t go around passing out cigars at softball practice,” she said. “We have a long way to go, and there’s no telling what could happen. Do you even know how high the miscarriage rate is for women my age? It’s much higher than you think.”

I heard her say this, but it didn’t stick. I was going to be a father.

The Basket, revisited

The next morning I visited my mother. I told her the news and she stood in the cramped foyer of her apartment next to a framed photo of me—eight years old, Steelers cap— and my dad—thin, two months before he died—and she cried. I think she wrote off the idea of me starting a family long before I had, and there I was, reporting news she thought she’d never hear, like the return home of a missing child.

When I was young we had a counted-cross stitch family tree in the guest bedroom. My mom and dad’s grandparents were on the trunk, and then the branches shot off in opposite directions with clumps of green leaves representing the names of the next generations. I hadn’t seen the tree in years, I suspect because looking at the empty branch next to my name had been hard for her to look at.

She kissed me on the forehead, and said how this would give her something to talk about when the ladies chatted about grandchildren and even great-grandchildren at

Bingo, and maybe someday my son or daughter could spend the night at her apartment to

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give us a break, a much-needed night out. She could convert her craft room into the child’s room, a place for him or her to play during visits, long or short, whatever we wanted. I nodded.

I emphasize this reaction because it culminated in my mother rushing to her bedroom, mid-sentence, and after some crashing and banging around, emerging with one of our Workshops Moses basket prototypes. The basket was walnut stained with a green and cream gingham liner covering the interior and a ruffle where the liner folded over the rim, tied to the solid ash handles with bows. I think it was the first one we made. She must have been storing National Geographics or bedding in it because there was lint inside, but, as she said, it would be perfect for the baby.

“Here,” she said, handing the basket to me. “Now let’s get to Discount Sam’s and fill it with things for that child of yours,” she said.

Two thoughts occurred to me in that moment. One was that it seemed entirely too soon to go shopping for the baby. Second was that Chelli would likely not want us to buy the baby’s first goods from Discount Sam’s. But neither seemed an appropriate response for the newly minted grandmother, age seventy-one, who already had changed out of her slippers, clutched her purse, and was waiting by the door.

The Beginning

Chelli was in the shower when Mom and I returned home with the full Moses

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basket.

We had done a good job, I thought. Green bibs and yellow pacifiers, books with fabric covers, a beige fleece blanket with Winnie the Pooh in the corner, duck shaped rattles and white onesies, Johnson and Johnson shampoo, tiny washcloths and fat bottles, and the personal items my mom picked out – lotions and ointments and nipple cream. I was nervous about all of it.

We put the basket on the kitchen island and waited. Chelli came out in her yellow bathrobe, her hair hanging wet around her face. She was surprised to see my mother, and

I immediately regretted not calling her first.

My mom smiled and went in for a hug. Chelli pulled back and moved toward the basket.

“What’s all this?” she asked as she wrung out her hair with a towel.

“Just a few things we picked up at the store,” my mom said.

“For what?”

“For the baby, of course. I couldn’t be happier with the news,” mom said. She put her arm around Chelli.

Chelli shot me a glare, pulled a few things out of the basket, examined them and tossed them on the counter.

“It is way too early for this,” she said, running her fingers through her bangs.

I wanted to interject, but mom beat me to it.

“Oh, we know dear. But we are so excited, and we wanted to get just a few things for you to put away for the baby. Just throw them in a closet and forget about them.

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Focus on you and my precious grandchild…”

“Was this your idea, Phil? Buying all this green and yellow, gender neutral stuff? We’re not going to use any of it, you know.”

“Yes, it was all my idea. Sorry. I’m just trying to celebrate,” I said.

“Well, you shouldn’t have,” she said. “It’s bad luck.”

Her Middle

Her belly began to swell last month, and she had to use a rubber band to extend her pants. She let me rub her stomach when we sat on the sofa. We stopped having sex.

The pregnancy book I read (while sitting on the john) said that was normal. I was relieved that I could go back to my old diet and drink milk again. Chelli went to the doctor, and he said everything was progressing normally. I could accompany her to the big ultrasounds, which she would let me know about when the time came. Clyde said this was strange—his ex-wife dragged him to every pre-natal appointment.

“You sure she’s knocked up, man?” he asked. “Wouldn’t be the first time I saw a fake.”

Don’t be ridiculous, I told him. I had seen a picture, a black and white photo of a white blob inside a black oval. That blob was my kid, buddy. Back off, I told him.

My mom said Chelli was just anxious. She had probably watched friends lose babies. It was normal. Give her time to get excited.

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I took on another client and helped him organize his company’s inventory using the same system we used back at BasketCase™. We had some extra money. I told

Chelli to go nuts, buy a fancy crib, pick out any rocker. She said she’d decided to use the room down the hall from ours for the nursery, the small room with the dormer window and light blue walls.

The End

Three days ago.

Chelli told me on the morning of May 19th – when she was just over fourteen weeks along—that she needed to run errands and get her nails done. I had emails to send and an arborvitae to plant in the side yard. I was in the kitchen at 11:30am to make myself a tuna sandwich when I heard the garage door open. I heard Chelli’s heels click on the ceramic tile in the laundry room. She breezed into the kitchen, her hair pulled back, big sunglasses on, and she began going through the mail. She looked through a mail-order catalog with athletic women on the cover. I said hello to her. She said nothing. I cut my sandwich in half.

“We are losing the baby,” she said. “I went to the doctor this morning. It’s done.”

I didn’t understand “it’s done.” Turkeys were done. Her nails were done. The baby couldn’t be done.

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“Your doctor’s appointment wasn’t until the 30th though,” I stammered. I had the day circled on my calendar. “Sixteen week appointment” in red letters. We were going to eat lunch at the new Mediterranean place afterwards. I remembered because I was going to make sure her food didn’t have feta, which I had read could be unsafe for the baby.

“I decided to go in today,” she said. She flipped the pages of the catalog. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t crying. I was having trouble breathing.

“But I thought you said the other day that you thought you felt the baby move?

Didn’t you say that? ”

“I guess I was mistaken.”

“So that’s it?”

“They are going to take it out tomorrow.”

“Take it out?”

“Take her out. Surgically. Quick and easy. I will be home in the afternoon. I have a friend picking me up.”

“A girl?”

“Yes, a girl. All my friends are girls, Phil.”

“No, the baby. She was a girl?”

She said nothing. She opened an envelope, a bill.

“I will take you,” I said. “We should do this together. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t go together.”

“It’s best if I go alone.”

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“This doesn’t make any sense to me,” I said.

“We’ll try again. I need to wait a month and then we will try again. You’ll need to start taking the pills and eating right again.”

I threw my sandwich in the sink and went over to her. She turned to walk away, and I grabbed her shirt.

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “I need to go. I have an appointment for my eyebrows.”

I wanted to grab her face between my hands and hold it until she started to cry. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t crying, but I thought if I just waited a minute, she’d start, and then I’d start, and we’d sit on the sofa and order take-in and watch a movie.

There were no tears.

“I don’t get it, Chel,” I said. “Things were fine, and now you are going to the doctor without me for ultrasounds that I was supposed to see? And now we have a crisis—that’s what this is, Chelli, a crisis—and you won’t let me help, won’t let me even take you to the doctor again? And now you are getting your eyebrows done? That’s what needs to be done right this minute? I can’t pretend to understand this. Can you sit down and explain it to me one more time? Start with when you got up today. You had a bowl of cereal with strawberries. Then what? Please?”

She broke the hold I had on her, looked at me, grabbed a magazine, and went out the garage door. I heard the car start.

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The Call

I stood in the kitchen for awhile. Ten minutes? Twenty? I googled the number for Chelli’s doctor and called, frantic. The receptionist connected me to Chelli’s doctor’s nurse. I think the conversation went something like this.

“I’m calling to follow-up on an appointment that Michelle Owens had today.”

“And you are?”

“Her husband, Phil Owens.”

I could hear typing.

“Ms Owens did not have an appointment today.”

“Yes she did. She found out the baby was a girl.”

“She didn’t find that out from us.”

“Can you confirm she has an appointment tomorrow?”

“Ms. Owens’ next appointment is on the 30th.”

“And she’s pregnant? Was pregnant?”

Silence for a second. More typing.

“Why yes, Mr. Owens, I show gravida equals one.”

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The Binder

I didn’t know how long an eyebrow appointment might have taken, but I suppose

I also knew that she wasn’t going to saunter in with perfectly arched brows. I waited a bit and then I started to snoop.

Chelli left her blue binder on the counter when she left. In recent weeks she had been using it to collect articles, notes, things of interest, the way you might use a day planner. I opened it. There were three-hold punched printouts from the internet, several pages on having a baby in your late thirties. Tips for getting pregnant. What to do if you can’t get pregnant. That sort of thing. Tucked in the back were ripped out pages from mail order catalogs with baby things. I remember feeling relief – these were the sorts of things you’d see a normal pregnant woman collect. Then, I flipped to the middle of the binder to some pages that were folded in half, length wise. I opened one up and found this:

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How to Conceive a Boy

For him: Baking soda cocktail * Alfalfa cocktail (not too much alfalfa because of the photo estrogens) * boxers to cool scrotum temperature * alkaline diet: red meats, eggs, raisins, mushrooms, beans * salty foods * celery, lettuce, asparagus, lemon, watermelon, grapefruit, green tea, almonds, and sunflower seeds * Avoid milk, pasta, carbs * PH should be alkaline * high intake of food throughout the day * potassium, calcium, and vitamins C, E, and B12 * Make him drink coffee one hour before sex *

Sex: He must orgasm first * He must initiate * He on top * At night only * Standing up good * Shettles method: vagina is most acidic near the entrance, and male sperm don't do well in acidic environments. Put sperm close to egg reducing the distance the sperm have to travel through the acidic vagina. Get faster-swimming Y-chromosome (male) sperm a head start over the X-chromosome (female) sperm. * wait to have sex until about 12 hours after you see your LH surge with ovulation test * The closer sex is to the day of ovulation à boy

Old Wives Tales: Females should worry, stress is good * dads of male babies should drink lots of soda * Only make love at night on odd days off the month * Make love when there is a one-quarter moon * Point your head to the north during sex * Lie on your back to give the “boy” sperm a chance to get to the egg * Women should sleep on the left of the bed always

*******Earliest gender determination: First Impressions Ultrasound Center—will do ultrasound scan at 14weeks5days. Call for an appointment.**********

Plan B: Ericsson Method Microsort Technologies In-vitro fertilization with Preimplantation Genetic Testing

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The Afterward

It made no sense, of course. Chelli had often stated her preference for a boy, in the same manner one might express an interest in sunny weather— desired, sure, but certainly not guaranteed.

I called the First Impressions Ultrasound Center phone number I found in the binder. They couldn’t tell me anything. I begged the receptionist. Their information was strictly confidential, but when I started crying she whispered that Chelli had an appointment there that morning. She paid cash. They weren’t expecting her back.

I dialed random phone numbers written in the back of her binder. One was for a nail salon, another for a sushi restaurant. The third was for a place that identified itself as a women’s clinic when I called. I stammered some questions about the services they provided, without using the right words. The receptionist got impatient. “If you are asking if we terminate pregnancies here, the answer is sometimes. If you are asking if I will give you that information about an adult patient, the answer is never.” She hung up.

I tried to track Chelli down. I called her cell. I called two of her friends. No one answered, no one knew.

I spent the next day sitting on the sofa waiting for her to return. I wasn’t sure what I would say, but I wanted her to come home. My mom called, and I didn’t answer.

Yesterday I went to my softball game. It was the first time I had left the house in two days. I left a note for Chelli on the kitchen counter, telling her where I went.

After the game Clyde asked me what was wrong. I had been particularly sluggish

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in the outfield, he said. We sat on the bench under the dugout. I told him everything— the whole story I have written here.

“That is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You think she is getting an abortion because she found out she was pregnant with a girl?”

“I think it is probably done by now.”

“Jesus Christ. I know a family lawyer, buddy of mine. Did my two divorces and my brother’s three. I’ll give him a call. You won’t owe her a cent for this shit. This is some fucked up shit, man. Fucked all to hell up shit.”

“I guess,” I said.

“What do you mean, you guess?” He glared at me. “You guess a fat guy’s weight at the carnival. You don’t guess that your wife is getting an abortion because she’s having a girl. Shit man, I’ve got two girls. This is the most screwed to hell up thing I’ve ever…”

“I get it Clyde, I get it. I see where you are coming from.”

He continued his rant. I put my bat in my duffel bag, changed out of my cleats and patted him on the back. “Thanks for listening,” I said. He hit his cleats with his

Louisville Slugger.

“Write it all down, buddy. You’ll see what I’m seeing eventually. Distance, man.

Find some,” he said. He continued yelling about his lawyer’s merits as I walked away.

So I’ve done that. Written it all down. And I thought this process would show what a fool I had been or what a witch my wife was and is. I thought maybe the story would show something I could have done differently, something I missed about her and

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us. But this story doesn’t do any of that for me. All this story does is make me yearn to hear the garage door go up and hear her heels clicking down the hall, so I can welcome her home, so I can give her, in whatever way I can, what she wants.

JAYNE TYPES

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 7 2:02pm subject: I have arrived

Steve,

I’m here. The drive took a little over four and a half hours, and there was no waiting at

Peace Bridge. I had quite a full car, as you can imagine, and although I was careful to hide the sweet corn and apples from the last CSA allotment (my agricultural contraband, as you called it last year) underneath the pillows, I think the case of wine was probably visible through the rear window. No matter though—the customs guy waved me through with just the usual questions. Traffic was light on the QEW, and the only place I had to wait was at Weber’s for a burger.

Fall has transformed the cottage. It sits naked and cold on the hill. The leaves on the birches have already begun to thin and every little imperfection— the cracks in the orange window trim, the tears on the front porch door screen, the rotting wood around the boathouse—seems illuminated against the gray, gray sky. Remember in undergrad when we studied Piaget’s theory of object permanence? That theory about how newborns only understand the existence of an object they can see? Well, in my infantile mind, this

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cottage only existed in the summer. You think you know a place after thirty-nine

Augusts only to have it surprise you on a single October day. Enough waxing on the changing seasons—I know this type of thing bores you terribly.

My brother forgot to call Francie, so there is a thin layer of dust on the furniture. And we have quite the insect graveyard here—coiled caterpillars in the windowsills, beetles wedged between floorboards, half-spun webs looming above frozen spiders. I will probably spend most of the day tomorrow cleaning if I can get Gram’s old Hoover running.

Dr. Greenblatt was right. A couple of weeks here will do me good.

Off to the grocery store. The little mart in Torrence is closed for the season, so I’ll be heading to Gravenhurst. Aren’t you impressed I got the dial-up working? I love that doot-doot-doot-doot static tone. Makes me feel connected to the world.

Jayne

PS) About the dreadful argument: you were right. I thought about turning the car around and apologizing for the things I said. I’m sure you’d have an apology too. I know I need to get more help, and I need to stop harping on you. It’s been three years since we lost him. That’s a long time to grieve, but do the math. That’s 7% of our lifetime. We’ve been sad for 7% of our lives. That’s nothing compared to people who have always been miserable, right? (The bottom line, since I know you love bottom lines: I left a message for Dr. Greenblatt to see if she could increase my appointments from once to twice a week when I get back. I think that’s a step in the right direction.)

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from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 8 11:15am subject: here, you aren’t 

Dear Steve,

Today is a total turnaround from yesterday’s gray. The sky is clear except for a few puffy clouds and the water is cool and smooth like green bottle glass. The thermometer by the back screen door says it is 45 degrees, but it must be at least 60 in the sun.

Weather lady on CBC radio says the water temperature is 59, much too chilly for a swim

I suppose, although it is tempting with all this sunshine. I know there is a ratty old wetsuit in one of the closets somewhere.

I had a fright down by the boathouse today. A huge dock spider, brown and hairy with a thin white stripe down her back, crawled out from where the swim ladder meets the dock.

She’s as big as a tea-saucer, I swear, and I spit out a piece of my Granny Smith apple when I saw her. I’ve seen smaller dock spiders up here before, and Gram always said they were harmless, but I don’t see how something that looks like a giant tarantula can be as innocuous as a Daddy Longlegs.

Speaking of looks, I forgot to mention that I ended up getting a quick haircut with Jorge on my way out of town. I would say that he hacked off my hair, but for $150 and all the time it took, I suppose there should be a more artistic term. Jorge says I look like a red- headed Princess Di (the more glamorous and sleek separated-from-Charles Princess Di, not the one with the 1981 wedding mop), and I think I like it. You’ve always liked my

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hair short, so I think you’d be pleased with how it turned out.

I’ve been cleaning most of the day. I got up all the dust and bugs and cleaned the old green linoleum in the bathroom twice—I still can’t get the dirt out of the cracks. I put some Murphy’s on the wood floors and was thinking of using it on the pine walls, but do you think that is okay? Murphy’s on the bedroom walls? I think it would really bring out the knots in the wood.

John left a lot of clutter lying around after he closed the cottage, mostly Maggie and

Lila’s things. Remind me come Christmas time that the nieces need no more toys! Oh, and I found Lila’s crib under a sheet in Gram’s closet. Maybe this is where John has always stored it, but it feels like he is hiding it from me. Knowing him, he probably thinks if I find it I’ll go into some sort of rage, chain it to my ankle, and go for a swim.

He gives me little credit in coping.

That reminds me. I’m missing this afternoon’s session with Dr. Greenblatt. Do you think

I should email her this week’s exercises from her book? Think she’d charge her hourly rate just to read an email from me? Not sure.

Jayne

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from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 9 10:01am subject: chilly

Dear Steve,

The baseboard heaters aren’t enough to warm the back bedroom, so I built a fire and slept in the Master, which felt strange. I can’t vacuum Gram’s footpath out of that pea green carpet or remove her coffee stains by the sliding glass door. I wore her wool sweater yesterday, and I could smell White Diamonds, that perfume she used to wear. I miss her.

Her imprint is everywhere.

If every night is this cold I am going to have to chop some more wood. I saw the axe in the shed yesterday. Hope I am not one-legged next time you see me!

Oh, regarding the shed—something weird happened when I was out there yesterday. I was looking for an old margarine container (don’t ask, I am rearranging the “junk” drawer next to the phone and need a place to put the paperclips), when I saw Maggie and

Lila’s old toys in plastic bins. They looked so pathetic and vulnerable in that rickety old shed, and I figured we wouldn’t want cobwebs or mouse droppings on their toys. So I started moving the boxes toward the shed door so I could make a few trips to their bedroom. That’s when I heard a strange noise.

I grabbed a rake and tapped around the floorboards to scare away any rodents, but the sound remained fixed near the boxes I had just moved. I dug through one or two before I

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found the culprit. A baby monitor, buried under some of Maggie’s stuffed animals, was turned on. I didn’t think anything of it until I stood up to put it in another box with the rest of the baby things, and the monitor sounded like it had clear reception for a second.

The static just sort of clicked into a different frequency and then went back to regular static, the way static sometimes does. I figured it must have interfered with the house radio or something, but it piqued my interest, you know? I rummaged through the boxes to look for the other monitor but couldn’t find it. I’m not sure why he’d keep just one monitor, so I brought it inside to find its mate.

Inside I listened to the monitor again, but I only heard normal static. I searched the house for the other monitor but found nothing. (I did locate the navy blue flip-flop you lost a few summers ago though. It was underneath the twin bed.)

So no big deal, except do you think the static I heard was weird? I figure that I jarred the

“on” button when I moved the boxes, but I still can’t shake that clear, empty noise I heard. Clear, empty noise—sounds like an oxymoron, but you’d know it if you heard it.

I know, I know, I am probably just trying to freak myself out.

Guess what the exercise this week is in Dr. Greenblatt’s Love and Loss book? “Write a letter, or series of letters, to someone who you have trouble communicating with in person.” (Much better than last week’s “Draw a picture of your biggest fear.”) Anyway, I am fulfilling the assignment by writing to you! Easy peasy.

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from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 10 9:12pm subject: communication failure?

I had considered that something was wrong with my email because I thought, maybe, just maybe, you’d at least acknowledge one of these notes. Even just to yell at me some more. But then I got an email from the infant loss support group, so I know I’m receiving messages just fine. The support group is looking for speakers again this winter. Three years out, and I am not sure if I can help the new parents as much as I could in the beginning. The group wants you to be raw, and I think I am getting tough, which is a good thing, right? Maybe I am finally getting to the place where you have been for awhile.

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 11 4:53pm subject: dreams

At night I’m still camped out in Gram’s room. It is warmer than the rest of the bedrooms, although wind gusts hiss through a bad seal around the sliding glass door, and the knots in the pine walls form funny faces if you look at them long enough. Last night I convinced myself I heard footsteps on the deck so I turned off the lights and peaked outside. Nothing but falling pinecones, of course. I stayed up past midnight reading a paperback detective novel I found in the nightstand and then turned on the radio to drown out the wind. There was a marathon of Chopin’s piano sonatas on the BBC. Luckily I

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fell asleep before the funeral march or I really would have freaked myself out, although I think the dirge influenced my dreams.

In one, I dreamt you were swimming in our old pool, only it was full of Murphy’s Oil

Soap instead of water, and you kept diving down to the bottom and touching the drain, over and over, only coming up for a quick breath before diving back down. The whole backyard smelled of pine, and your hair was greasy and your eyes were bloodshot. You looked like you were covered in honey. I yelled from the kitchen window to get you to come inside for dinner, but you just kept diving down, again and again, ignoring me. Not a lot of mystery why I dreamed that last part, I suppose.

I woke up at six to the sun pouring through the spindles in Gram’s headboard. Their shadows looked like long metal bars trapping the knotty pine faces in the walls. I bundled up in your Cornell sweatshirt and took my coffee down at the look-out to watch the rest of the sunrise. You might have liked it—the way the sun rose like an orange orb above Old Woman Island and cast its reddish glow across the lake. I even saw a pair of loons down at the Point. Too bad the old sailor’s adage about the red sky is always right.

The clouds are rolling in already.

Five more weeks until Charlie’s third birthday. I am trying to focus on that date instead of the February date like Dr. Greenblatt suggested (there should be a word for that day instead of “anniversary of the death of Charlie.” Why is there no word for a day that

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happens for us all? I guess no one wants to say “deathday?”) She said to celebrate his birth this time, celebrate him, but of course that won’t be easy. I wish you were here to talk, but I know you wouldn’t want to anyway.

I’m lonely here, Steve.

--J

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 11 1:02am subject: HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOO????????????

Ok, so, I keep replaying our last fight over and over in my head. When you said we needed to take a break from each other for awhile, you were serious. I have stopped compulsively checking my email to look for one from you.

I should probably just stop writing, and you can see if my silence is really what you want.

But I feel compelled to write to you, not just because of the stupid Love and Loss assignment but because I feel clear-headed up here, and writing comes easy since I have no one else to talk to. Knowing that you might take me a few minutes each day to hear from me gives me enormous comfort. Are you okay in giving me that sort of comfort?

Because I’m taking it. Delete if you want. I also take comfort in not knowing if you do.

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from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 13 6:03am subject: nursery webs

I’m still chugging along. The barometer is stuck on “stormy” and I think a front has settled in for a few days. I thought about going for a swim because the water should feel warm in comparison to the air, right? Somehow that logic never seems to work, although

I did find the wetsuit tucked in the back closet.

I wish I had a camera to send you a picture of this mammoth dock spider. She camps out on the rocks, moving throughout the day to avoid the long shadow cast by the boathouse so she can bask in the sun. Today I went in for a closer look. She’s toting an egg sac— it’s whitish and round and attached to the underside of her abdomen and it looks uncomfortable, like a tumor. I found a copy of a 1982 field guide on the bookshelf in the back bedroom, which has a blurb about these things—we always called them dock spiders—turns out they are from the genus Dolomedes and are sometimes called “nursery web spiders” because when she’s done lugging this egg sac around, she’ll wrap it up in fine threads and wait for the babies to hatch. The dad probably isn’t around to see the little guys since the female often eats her mate after breeding. Did you know that the reason she dines on her mate is to provide herself with extra sustenance to lug that sac around? Eating him gives her energy to be a mother. Fascinating!

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from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 13 12:32pm subject: more, not the same

Steve,

I know I should leave well enough alone, but I got that baby monitor out again last night.

I know you are going to think I am crazy, but I swear that monitor is picking up a frequency from somewhere. Last night I switched the channel to “B” and I definitely heard something, not the clear, empty noise again but a sound inside the static, sort of fighting against it. It’s a knocking noise. Hee-knock-hee-knock-hee-knock: that’s how I would say it sounds. I can’t place the sound, and I certainly can’t figure out where it is coming from. Needless to say, I did not sleep well again. I drank the rest of the

Canadian Club and fell asleep next to the fire.

Did I mention previously that I get it? I get that you don’t want another baby, if that’s what you want me to get. Or not get, as it were. Does that make things better?

Jayne

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 14 5:13pm subject: buzzed

I’m being rational about this whole baby monitor thing, I swear. This morning I walked down the gravel path between the cottages. I thought maybe one of the cousins came up

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from Toronto for the weekend and brought something that is causing interference—a cordless phone, satellite dish, another baby monitor. Something. But there is no sign of anyone. Clean firepits, closed shutters, vacant beach. There isn’t even that archaic stink coming from Great Uncle Ernie’s old outhouse.

When I walk to the Brown’s boathouse down at the Point, the noise is a bit louder. Hee- knock-hee-knock-hee-knock.

I think I am going to put on that wetsuit and go for a swim. I think the ice-cold water will do me good and clear my head.

-Your Jaynie

PS) You never told me how good the bottle of 2005 Old Vine Quinta do Crasto was! I will try and save one from the case for you ;)

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 15 9:56am subject: swimming the depths

Steve,

Have a big headache this morning. Unsure of whether it is from the wine, my period, lack of sleep, or the SWIM I took yesterday afternoon.

Yes, I took the plunge! The worst was the jump, of course; the water penetrated my ears,

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nose, pores, cervices, turning all my tissues to bone. Truly frigid. The wetsuit helped, but it has a few holes and it’s all stretched out in the midsection. It must have been

John’s before he lost his potbelly. It makes me look a little pregnant, and that makes me more than a little sad.

So I skimmed across the top of the water like one of those water bugs because the surface felt much warmer than just a few inches below. It didn’t take long to adjust and within a minute or two I was diving down and back up doing the butterfly kick. (Remember you said I looked like a dolphin when we swam with the stingrays in Cayman?) I felt completely invigorated afterwards, and I am contemplating a night swim. Dare me?

When I got out of the water, the dock spider was waiting for me by the ladder. There must be 500 baby spiders balled up in her mass. No fair that some of us get hundreds of babies and some of us barely get one. The monitor saga continues. I turn it on every few hours to see if there is a change in the static. The knocking sound I heard yesterday seems to have faded away. Maybe I was overthinking it?

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 15 1:23pm subject: noises

It’s back. The knocking has been replaced by a low humming. It almost sounds human, but I know it can’t be unless it is picking up a TV signal from somewhere. Low and soft,

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hmmmm-nahmmm-nahmmm—well, that’s not it exactly, God, why can’t we write noises the same way we can write words? Frustrating. I have walked down the path in both directions and I see nothing out of the ordinary.

I guess last week when you said you needed a break from me you meant it. The silence coming from your end is palpable. If could ball it up and take a bite, it would taste bitter.

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 16 6:45am subject: remembering last June

I just had a thought. Do you remember last summer when we were sitting out on the lookout, enjoying chanti and s’mores, when we heard Frank Sinatra playing from somewhere? We were stumped about where the music came from until later that night, when we took the motorboat out to watch the sunset and saw and heard the people in the lone cottage over on Old Woman Island having a party, listening to Frank? You didn’t think that the music could carry that far across water, but it did. It’s almost a full mile away—I know it doesn’t look that far, but it is. Gram gave John and me a swim test when we were twelve; we had to swim halfway to Old Woman with all our clothes on to prove we could watch the cousins swim alone at the beach. Well, I bet the sound carries even better this time of year when there are no boats and fewer leaves. I am certain the noise isn’t coming from this side of the lake—do you think it could be coming from Old

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Woman? I’m going to take the monitor down to the Point again this afternoon and see if this humming is louder as I get a bit closer to the island.

I’ll keep you posted. And you keep me posted. Yeah, right.

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 16 1:37pm subject: wading through

Steve,

The phone rang this morning, and for a second, I thought it might be you. I was taking the recycles out, and dropped them to get to the phone in time (shattering a wine bottle in the process.) Alas, as you know, it was not you. It was a wrong number—a man asking for a Peggy—and it was one of those wrong numbers where you get a little chill up your spine and worry that the call was made to scout you, rather than Peggy, out. A girl can drive herself crazy with thoughts like these.

Last night at sundown I took the baby monitor down to the beach at the tip of the Point. I took my shoes off, rolled up my jeans and waded out about fifteen feet on my tiptoes, until the water skimmed the ends of my hair. I held the monitor over my head, and the signal was definitely stronger. The noise now sounds like a woman humming, low and soft, but just when I think I can detect a melody, the static kicks back, loud and jarring.

The birds flew from their perches in the birches and the water almost rippled from the static.

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Afterwards I went home and built a hot fire to warm my feet. I nearly put them in the coals, my toes were so frigid, and I think I even smelled some burnt hair (you not being here has given me little reason to shave my legs.)

The wine helped warm me some too. You would have liked this case.

Jayne

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 17 1:45am subject: my memory

Stephen,

I finally placed that knocking sound I first heard from the monitor, that hee-knock-hee- knock-hee-knock noise. The thought occurred to me when I was on the front porch swing this afternoon. The knocking sounds exactly like Gram’s old Hitchcock rocker she had in her library back in Boston. The chair was black with brown pinecones stenciled on the top and when you went back too far on the rockers, it would make a knocking noise as you rocked forward. John and I would take turns pushing each other on it, just so we could make that noise—hee-knock-hee-knock-hee-knock.

I tell myself that rocker is not here—it’s probably in the home of an estate sale bargain hunter in Winchester. Just because I hear a sound I know doesn’t mean it’s coming from

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a place I can find. It’s like a corollary to Piaget’s theory. If we play a young baby the sound of his mother’s voice, does he think his mother is inside the tape player?

By the way, I have decided against contacting Dr. Greenblatt while I am up here, if that matters at all to you. I’m enjoying my time away from her quite honestly.

Jayney

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 17 6:23am subject: the game

Steve,

I went for a midnight swim last night! A terrifying and exulting experience, and I must tell you about it. I had a glass or two of wine, started yet another detective novel, and tried to keep my mind off the monitor (which I hide under the twin bed next to your flip- flop when it is not in use.)

I was reading, deep in the head of a woman who discovered her salesman husband was a

CIA agent and a polygamist to boot, when I suddenly felt very exposed and illuminated in the cottage. I mean, it was no different from any other night, but at that moment I realized that someone outside the cottage could see me, crystal clear, and there I sat, unable to see anything but what was right before me—my book, a wine bottle, the birch burning hot and fast in the fire. So I turned off the cottage lights and through the

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windows I could see the lake, it looked so calm and smooth, and at that moment I decided

I had to break the surface. I put on Gram’s robe, turned on the light by the stone steps, and tiptoed down to the dock.

I didn’t even hesitate this time. I just dove. Oooh, that water is cold without that sun out!

I got the heebie-jeebies when I thought about the enormous, ugly fish that weave in and out of the algae covered rocks at the bottom of the lake, twelve feet down. I used to go in search of them when I was a kid, and some of the big ones would dart out from their rocks like electric eels, with gaping mouths, bulging eyes, and gray-green scales that matched the color of the water exactly.

My game last night was to dive a few feet below the surface and curl myself into a ball, chin tucked, my hands on my knees. I would do a few disorienting somersaults— forward, backward, to the side— and then guess which way was up. I would swim a few strokes in that direction, and if I was right, I would break the surface, and if I was wrong, my hands would scrape the thick algae on the rocks. I found this delightfully terrifying.

I probably played a dozen times before my head began to feel like slush from the icy water. You’d think I would have probably “won” the game most of the time and broken the surface, right? Well, I have been picking the algae out from underneath my fingernails all morning. It’s amazing how you can confuse yourself in the cold darkness and completely lose your bearings.

The humming is getting louder. When I walk down the drive, away from the lake, there

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is no humming on the monitor. When I walk closer to the lake, and closer to Old

Woman, the humming is louder. I’m not a scientist, but this confirms my hypothesis re: where the sound is coming from. Even you and your logic couldn’t dispute this.

Jay Bird

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 18 8:43am subject: my idea

A revelation!

I have been feeling desperately landlocked, wanting nothing other than to get closer to the noises coming from Old Woman Island. I have been wading with the monitor down at the beach several times now, getting wet up to my waist, and I am sure I am hearing both knocking and humming now, simultaneously through the static.

I don’t know why this idea didn’t occur to me sooner. John and I used to take out the rowboat all the time when we were kids, and I sort of forgot about the old thing after we got the speedboat and starting skiing and tubing. We put it under the cottage years ago, and wouldn’t you know, it is still there, with one full-sized oar and one child-sized one, but I think I can make it work. So I am going to take the boat out after dinner and paddle closer to Old Woman. Isn’t that a great idea? I am thrilled with myself. We’ll get to the bottom of these noises once and for all. The humming has changed a little. It’s more of a hummm-nah-rum-la-hummm-nah-rum-la. Like a lullaby.

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It’s not too late for you to stop being furious with me. I’ll forgive you.

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 19 11:34am subject:

Stephen,

I took out the rowboat. I wasn’t even halfway across the lake when I heard the crying through the static. A baby crying, I swear. Worse, I didn’t hear its mother or father, no humming, no rocking, nothing. I am worried there is a baby alone and no one to care for her. Please let me know what I should do. I will take the boat over to the island tomorrow. I just need to build up some courage.

The lady on the CBC said we might see snow flurries tonight. I am going to Gravenhurst right now to get more wine, food, and extra batteries for the monitor. I am worried what would happen if I ran out of any of these things.

from: Jayne Bridges [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 20 3:32am subject: I lost… the rowboat. I tied it to the dock ring last night and I just went down there to take it out, and it is gone. I knew I should have gotten new ropes—my knots were good, but the rope was weak.

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I am going to put on the wetsuit and swim out there as best I can, with the monitor held over my head. It will slow me down, but I can do it, I am sure. It’s just Gram’s swim test again. I am sure there is a baby on Old Woman and I am sure she needs me. I am worried she is cold.

from: Jayne Bridges [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 20 6:42am subject: what’s it called when you kill your mother?

Oh, and I found the spider on the dock this morning just as the sun was coming up. She is half-dead next to her egg sac, which has burst open and looks like the beige inside of a tennis ball. Hundreds of little spiders the size of gnats are crawling all over her, but her legs are still twitching. She must know she’s being eaten alive by her kids. If I were in the support group tonight, this would be a trigger image to discuss. I am going to get a shovel and bury her by the shed.

from: Jayne Bridges [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 20 6:02pm subject: i hear them all the time

The baby is not alone.

I swam almost halfway across the lake with the monitor, and I could hear the singing. A

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woman is singing and humming and rocking the baby (hee-knock-hee-knock-hee-knock), but the baby still cries.

She sings to her in the dark—I see no lights on in the cottage or in their boathouse. She sings:

As little Jenny Wren was sitting by the shed She waggled with her tail and nodded with her head She waggled with her tail and nodded with her head As little Jenny Wren was sitting by the shed

Did your mom sing you this song? Is this a common childhood song? I need to know this, and there is no one to ask. I need to know because Gram always sang me this rhyme, but substituted Jaynie for Jenny. Johnny sometimes too. Tell me your mother sang “Little Stevie Wren” to you. That’s possible, right? Tell me that’s possible. Maybe all mothers sing this song to their babies.

Next time I will take a life preserver and I will go all of the way to the island. If you are reading this, if you care at all, say a prayer for me.

from: Jayne [email protected] to: [email protected] date: October 30 6:23pm subject: the truth

I haven’t written in awhile, and to be honest, not talking to you for ten days has been

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helpful. Cathartic, really. I believe the next break I take will be even longer, but I owe you—okay, maybe not you, but I owe this correspondence—an account of what happened when I made it to Old Woman Island.

I swam with an orange life preserver over my wetsuit. Gray clouds swirled above me as I made my way across the freezing lake. The monitor got wet, despite my efforts, and the static became particularly choppy and irregular. I hardly noticed because I was listening for real crying and singing. That also didn’t come.

I had to break a pane of glass in their cottage, a back door with twenty or more picture frame sized panes. It won’t be expensive for them to fix just one. And don’t worry—I wrapped my hand in one of Gram’s dishtowels, the 1970’s one with a log cabin and a mustard-colored alphabet that’s supposed to look hand stitched. I just punched, reached inside, and turned the deadbolt. Who are you locking out when you live on a private island, I wonder? Me, I guess. Now that I am thinking of it, I think I left the dishtowel there on the counter.

The main living room was two-stories and open except for the dark exposed beams that ran horizontally just under the ceiling pitch. Everything was covered in sheets, some cream, others white, but I could make out the oversized mission-style sofa—Stickley, maybe?—and leather wingbacks flanking the stone fireplace. Even the artwork was covered by sheets, and so were the moose antlers above the fireplace, and the iron

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chandelier in the dining area, which hung by thick chains to the beams. My first thought was how those beams would be a perfect place to hang oneself (alert: call Dr.

Greenblatt!) My second thought was surprise at how masculine the place was—not a cottage at all, but a lodge, a place for men to smoke cigars, play pool, drink Scotch and

Soda, and badmouth their wives.

I could almost see you there, at a party perhaps, tapping your foot to your father’s favorite music playing on the old Zenith, humming along to “You’re Nobody ‘Til

Somebody Loves You,” sipping a sweating drink as you looked out on the lake and thought about what life might be like if a couple days of it had been different. Hours, really. Maybe you’re like me and you’ve dissected it down to the second, that one second when Charlie might have breathed instead of not breathed. The nanosecond in his crib where the air suddenly turned against him and suffocated rather than sustained him.

The amount of time it takes to get an idea: how long is that? The idea to go check on him instead of pouring another glass of wine, let’s say. That slice of time that is so small that we can’t fathom it, but it can undo us forever. Maybe that is what you’d think about if you were in that room with those dark beams.

I was calm out there on Old Woman Island. I had played out all the scenarios in my head. I’m not crazy, you know. Crazy would have been running through that place like a patient at Brylin. No, I knew I needed to stay composed.

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So I open the first door. Bathroom. The second door is the Master bedroom with the same knotty pine walls Gram’s room has. Third door. What do we have here, Monty?

Behind door number three? Boom.

A long, airy room with hardwood floors and a long panel of eastward facing windows that looks out on the lake. You can see our cottage across the bay. On the right wall, there is a crib made out of dark wood. And on that crib, soft cotton sheets done in a toile print of a whimsical vintage circus—a bear walking the tightrope, monkeys in red hats with gold tassels, a smiling ringleader with a whip he doesn’t use to tame the trumpet- playing lions—a scene so sweet and pretty that I would have chosen it myself for baby bedding. Perpendicular to the crib is a small bed under the panel of windows, a toddler bed, with a cheap cartoony comforter featuring one of those TV characters you’d know if you saw it. Next to the toddler bed, end to end, is a set of oak bunkbeds, with madras plaid bedding and a teddy bear on the bottom bunk. And the final bed in the room—yes, there were four beds—is against the left wall, across the room from the crib. It is a double bed with a plain navy blue comforter and a plain white pillowcase, a big boy bed.

A man could live his whole life in this room, transferring from bed to bed, spending increasing amount of time in each until he curled up in the last one. There he’d die eventually, if he were lucky at least, not because he died in his sleep, but because he died in a bed and not in his crib. People take that for granted—not dying in their cribs. What happened to Charlie…it could have happened to any of us, you know.

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I would have told you by now if there had been a baby in the room. I can almost hear you snickering at me. There wasn’t a rocker or the other monitor or any sign of anyone having been there since summer, maybe longer. No other furniture, and nothing in the closets except a pair of scuba flippers and a raincoat. At first this was sad to me, and I thought I needed to keep looking for the baby, the rocking, the humming, the crying. I sat on the bottom bunk, hugged the teddy bear, and contemplated the baby and that room.

I felt at peace in there, and it has been a long time since I felt at peace anywhere near a crib.

I think Charlie resides there, Steve. Our Charlie, in that room. He’s moved beyond that crib and he’s in a bigger bed now. He has room to grow and expand.

I can see his room from our cottage right now. I have my binoculars, and I can see the line of windows and even the outline of the upper bunk bed, the shadow of the comforter that drapes over the side. I can keep an eye on him from here until I go for my next visit before the snow comes.

I’ve been doing some internet reading up at Walker’s Point Library, where the connection speed is faster. Did you know that Piaget’s theory has been challenged recently? Back when I was young Jayne Brigham and you were Stephen Bridges and by alphabetical providence we sat next to each other in Developmental Psych, we learned that babies don’t learn object permanence until the coordination of secondary circular reactions

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develop, at 8 to 12 months. Now researchers are saying that this skill might develop as early as three and a half months.

I never mentioned this, but I thought of Piaget when we lost Charlie. He was five months old, and I thought that if we were out of his sight, we were out of his mind. I had thought maybe he didn’t feel alone when, you know, it happened. But if three month old babies know that objects exist when not in their view, if their minds are that developed, then perhaps Charlie did know we were in the next room. At first this made me sad, knowing that he might have felt alone. But my thinking has evolved as I have gone on this odyssey. He might have known I wasn’t there, but maybe he also knew I’d be back. That gives me tremendous peace because I have returned to him now. I have found him here.

I realize now why you are not writing me back. It’s not because of the arguments over the years, the discussions over growing our family again, the last blow-out fight we had before I left. It’s because I’ve found him and you haven’t, and that makes you upset.

To find something, Steve, you need to look.

-Jayne Brigham Bridges.

COMPANY

I had been a Human Resources supervisor-in-training at the office supply company for almost two months when Seth, the narcoleptic HR manager, woke from his afternoon snooze to ask me to take a thick yellow envelope to George Silver’s house.

Previous attempts to mail the materials to George had resulted in no return, despite the inclusion of a self-addressed stamped envelope, which irked Seth, who was nothing if not a diligent paper-pusher. “You can leave early,” Seth promised me, “although George lives in the country, I’m afraid,” he said, as if he were really afraid of the country.

I shrugged and agreed to the task—at that point in my career I agreed to all tasks—thinking it strange that George, an employee who had been absent every day since

I joined the company, could not pick up an envelope of dismissal papers himself. But the only question I asked was what to do if George wasn’t home, an insightful inquiry I thought, given the forty-minute drive to his house. “He’ll be home,” Seth said. “That guy? I’d give my first-born if he wasn’t sitting on the sofa when you get there.” I didn’t know a lot about Seth, but I was pretty sure he didn’t have a wife or a first-born. He smoothed his shirt over his protruding stomach, leaned back in his chair, and yawned.

“Just make sure he signs the pink and yellow forms and bring them in with you tomorrow.” Easy enough, I thought as I grabbed my coffee and keys and darted for the door, envelope in hand.

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Leaving work two hours early to run an errand was a treat. Although I was training for a role to manage people, my preparation consisted of sitting in a beige cubicle filing resumes, entering attendance data, and answering calls when the receptionist was at lunch. I was jealous of the other management trainees in places like Sales, Receiving, and Shipping who wore steel-toed boots, filled customer orders, and chatted with the staff. People in Human Resources didn’t really interact with other people, a discovery I found rather antithetical to the position and job posting I had found on my college online career board.

But it was 2001 and my job options with a philosophy degree from a middle-of- the-road liberal arts college were limited, and this was a good paying job that afforded me my own place and a certain comfort in my wake-drive-work-drive-eat-read-sleep pattern.

I had just leased a new Volkswagen Jetta that had seen little but the state route between work and my apartment, a somber stretch of road that passed two Super Walmarts, an outlet mall, and a row of oversized homes with aluminum-sided chimneys that sat uncomfortably close to the highway.

George, on the other hand, did indeed live in the country. I drove through the usual Ohio cornfields dappled with the odd vendors and signage of rural life: “Cockatiels and squash sold here” next to a small ranch home, "We have shrimp!" next to a trailer with a green and white striped awning, and “Walmart is not the only saving place” in front of a one-room church. The roads were paved, but dust and fallen leaves swirled in the streets, and I added “car wash” to my mental to-do list. That list also included take- out and a manicure if I could make the journey to George’s house a quick one.

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House number 18 on Rural Route 4 was the second house on the left, about a quarter mile from its neighbor. The rectangular ranch was more of a trailer, lemon yellow, visibly cemented to the ground on cinder blocks. The house sat on a hill, the knee-high grass having gone to seed seasons ago. I parked my car on the gravel driveway, grabbed the yellow envelope from the passenger seat, and walked toward the house. A long ramp with jagged and splintered boards started halfway up the walkway and was clearly made by someone who was not a carpenter. A shutter-less picture window took up a large amount of space on the front of the house, the Levelors tightly closed. I walked past a row of dead rosebushes and tipped over plastic pots filled with the remains of last summer’s harvest, wrinkled carcasses of tomatoes and white seeds from the green peppers. On the front stoop sat a rotting pumpkin left over from Halloween and off to the side, a brown UPS package, soggy from the previous night’s rain.

I faced the door and took a deep, cleansing breath that bit at my lungs, the exhale lingering heavy around my face. It struck me as I stood there, alone and not within screaming distance from the neighbors, that I didn’t fully think through the nature of this errand. I didn’t know much about Human Resources, but I knew most folks didn’t like bad news or the people who brought it, and I knew nothing about George but the basics.

He had worked in the packing department, an entry-level job, although the company paid more than twice the minimum wage and provided excellent benefits. Something had happened and he had stopped coming to work several months ago, a rare scenario for a company that paid more than most in the area and offered perks ranging from free staplers to college tuition reimbursement. Seth had offered no explanation about George,

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and I, in my green eagerness to leave my spreadsheets for the day, had not asked. I took solace in the fact that this whole thing should take less than two minutes. In and out.

I knocked on the rusted storm door and the rapping against the cold metal stung my knuckles. I folded my hands under my arms, hugging the envelope to my chest, and examined my reflection in the storm door. I heard a scurrying inside and the house seemed to shake.

The door opened. A gigantic black man, an inch or two taller than the glass storm door, ducked his head under the doorframe and looked at me with raised eyebrows. He had a broad face, short cropped hair, and deep brown eyes framed by horn-rimmed glasses that were held together in the corner by what looked to be a thin piece of silver duct tape. He wore an orange, hooded Cleveland Browns sweatshirt and clashing, tight red sweatpants. Anything would be tight on him. He was a giant.

“Yes?” he said, sizing me up. I became hyper-aware of my outfit-- the collar of my green polo shirt peeking out from my expensive ski coat, my navy Sperry Top-siders showing underneath pressed khakis, these were the trappings of the management trainee up-and-comer, belonging to someone who didn’t really ski, much less boat, in the middle of Ohio.

“Er, hi, Mr. Silver? I am Jen, from, uh, where you work. Seth told me to drive out here and get your signature on a couple of forms.” I handed him the envelope and waited for him to take it. He looked at me.

“Uh, so here it is, if you wouldn’t mind signing the forms inside, and I’ll take them back to the office for you.” I held the envelope a little closer to the door, and turned

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a Topsider toward the ramp. “You know, so you won’t have to bother with them.”

He opened the storm door all the way and propped his large hand against the doorframe. The smell of TV dinner and Band-aids wafted out from the house.

“I was expecting someone else.” He paused. “It was Jen, you said?"

I nodded. I wasn’t sure if he expected someone else from work or someone else in general.

"Why then, Jen, have you ever had a Texas Governor’s Ranch cookie?

I felt my face look confused. I said no.

“Well, a lady from our church brought over a couple of dozen of them today, and

Lord knows I can’t eat them all. Besides, Loie and Des would love to meet you. Would you come in?” He smiled, his cheeks deeply and surprisingly dimpled.

“Oh, thanks, but I should really get going. Thanks, though.”

“They’d really love the company. Come on in. It’s chilly out here,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly.

I extended the envelope straight out from my body, putting it so close to his hand that it might have touched him. I started a refusal again, but George reached his arm out and placed his palm on the back of my jacket, coaxing me inside.

The summer before I began kindergarten, my mom sent me to Safety Town at the

YMCA to learn about crosswalks and stop signs and cars that slow down as they pass you walking home from school, about men who read your name off your backpack, lure you in their cars, and snatch you up forever. On the last day of Safety Town, they gathered all the kids together, fifty five-year olds, and a man we hadn’t seen before came in with a

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huge bowl of candy and sat in the middle of our circle. He asked us who wanted candy, and my hand shot up with most of the other kids. He beckoned us forward. I ran up to him as fast as I could, my small hand extended. I took the Tootsie Roll from him, turned, and ran back to my seat. I remember wondering why the other kids weren’t in on the candy giveaway, but I was too busy unwrapping the waxy paper when our teacher swooped in and snatched the brown candy from my hand. All week we had discussed strangers with candy, and hadn’t I listened at all? I broke into tears—the thought that a stranger could exist at Safety Town inside the YMCA didn’t make sense to me. If he was bad, why would they let him into the room? Was that Tootsie Roll poisoned? Of course, he was the husband of a teacher, and of course they had hoped that someone would take the bait, to teach the lesson. I was that person. I always had a problem with the bait.

I resisted at the threshold. My thoughts turned to the background check the company must have performed when he started—he must have passed, right?—and how soon Seth would realize I was missing if I didn’t show up for work the next morning.

God, would he even notice at all? I went inside.

The air in the house was hot, almost balmy. The family room occupied much of the small house, with a galley kitchenette peeking out from the right and two doors likely leading to a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom to the left. The green shag carpet was clean, but matted down and worn to the netted backing in several places. On the wood paneled walls hung dozens of items: a yellow, green and red flag with Bob Marley’s face on it, an iron crucifix, a wall calendar open to the previous June, a ripped Harley

Davidson bumper sticker that looked permanently stuck to the wall despite efforts to peel

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it off, and a painted sign reading, “Always kiss me goodnight” in cursive letters. A humidifier hummed in one corner, and a television with rabbit ears blared Wheel of

Fortune in the other. And in front of the television, facing away from me, were two people in wheelchairs, a woman with black hair streaked with a few strands of gray, and a smaller girl with her hair in braids, studded with white and orange plastic beads. I had a sudden, breathtaking hatred for Seth, for not preparing me for this.

“Come meet my girls,” George said, lumbering over to the wheelchairs, his head inches from ceiling. His immense size in the space of the cluttered room and in comparison to the women made George look like a giant trudging through a toy house.

He turned the first wheelchair around to face me. The woman had beautiful and delicate features, a strong jaw line, pink lips, and a completely vacant stare.

“This is my wife, Des. She’s been doing so much better in the last few months.

Aren’t you, Des?” He patted her head and leaned down so she could see him smile. The woman gave a slow and deliberate nod. I nodded too.

He wheeled around the other chair. “And this is our daughter Lois, but we call her

Loie, don’t we, Lo? Well, I guess we call her Lo too.” He let out a deep chuckle and grabbed a pink washcloth from the back of her chair.

“Well, don’t be shy. Come say hello,” he said. At first I thought he was talking to them, but then, of course, realized he had to be speaking to me.

"We just braided Lo’s hair today. We did it up in Browns colors. That's what we decided together, didn't we? She used to have blue ones in there, but we’re playing the

Cowboys this weekend, so we can’t have that, right, Lo?" He laughed.

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Loie’s arms were short and her legs were stubs. A thin line of drool dripped out of the corners of her cracked lips, which were open enough to show overlapped teeth that looked large and painful. She had long-lashed brown eyes that seemed cast permanently to the left, now fixed on the microwave, which was counting down the minutes on the TV dinner. George dabbed the drool with the pink cloth and looked at me.

“So how long have you worked at the old stomping grounds?” he asked, as though the tedium of the introductions were over and we could move onto more personal things.

I fiddled with the zipper on my ski jacket and averted my eyes to the kitchen. The countdown on the microwave seemed like a ticking bomb. I cleared my throat.

“Well, I started in September. I took the summer off after I finished school. I’m working with Seth in Human Resources. And well, here I am.” I wanted to take back that last part because it sounded like this errand was something I did regularly. Filing employee reviews, entering data about time missed and emergency contacts, scheduling interviews, that’s what I did. This, most certainly, was not.

“Are you happy?” he asked, turning Des and Loie’s chairs back toward the television. I wasn’t sure if he meant in general (answer: sort of) or at work (answer: not really). Work seemed like safer terrain.

“I guess so. I mean, the people there, as you know, are pretty nice, and I am getting used to the computer system, so yeah, I suppose it is going well.” The microwave dinged.

“Mighty fine place to work if you ask me. Just look how long they paid me after

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our accident. Almost five months? That's just too kind of them. Not many companies that would do that for you these days." He paused.

"Mind if I ask you how old you are?” He walked over to the kitchenette, took the plastic tray out of the microwave and peeled back the plastic. He wiped the steam from his glasses and went around the corner, out of my view. I heard a drawer open and silverware clank.

“Twenty-two,” I said, self-consciously. “Well, almost twenty-three.” This qualifier felt like the adult equivalent of a kid saying she was six and three-quarters.

George walked past me, and I noticed a slight limp. He stirred what looked like

Salisbury steak and noodles. I was hungry, but the smell was nauseating.

“That’s a good age. We had Loie at that age, I think. Didn’t we Des? Or were you twenty-one?” Des didn’t move. Pat Sajack consoled a woman who had just gone bankrupt.

“Yeah, that’s about right, since Lo is about ten now. Geez, I can’t remember these things anymore. Used to rely on Des for all this remembering. Hope she’s back with us soon.” He smoothed back her hair. Des gave the same slow nod. I did the math. George was thirty-three.

The room was quiet as Vanna turned several E’s on the puzzle board. I could feel myself sweating underneath my coat, on my forehead. The envelope felt heavy in my hands.

“Mr. Silver, it was so nice to meet your wife and daughter, but I…”

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George was about to spoon a mouthful of noodles into Des’s mouth when there was a loud ring from a large cream-colored rotary wall phone in the kitchenette. George put Des’s dinner on her wheelchair tray and said a quiet “excuse me” as he walked by me to answer the phone.

“Why, hello, sir. No sir, I have not received it yet,” George said as he took another dinner out of the freezer and started to open it with one hand.

“Delivered, you say? Well, I will have to call UPS. We are out in the country here, and sometimes those guys can’t find where we are at, so the…”

I wanted to motion to George that the package he was looking for might be on the front stoop, but his back was to me as he intently typed numbers on the small microwave, beep, beep, beep. The puzzle on the television clearly read “Employees Must Wash

Hands,” but the man spun anyway and lost his turn.

With that Loie began to scream, a guttural wailing that started loud and continued on even pitch. Her head was still cocked to the side, and I was afraid to walk around to the front of her out of fear that her eyes would be rolled back in her head and her mangled teeth bared. Des lifted her hands up from her tray slowly, the first move I had seen her make other than her subtle nods. She covered her ears with her hands. I stared at George, aghast. He was talking about tracking numbers and rural roads.

“Yes, we are okay here, sir. That’s just my daughter, sir,” George shouted over the wailing. The screaming continued, up a half octave from the original pitch.

I imagined the man on the other end of the line making a comment about the perils of raising an infant.

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“Yes sir, we’ll be keeping an eye out sir,” George said, and hung up the phone.

George walked over to his daughter and stood in front of her, his back to the television set, blocking it completely. He gripped her with both hands, his fingers wrapped almost completely around the back of her head. He squeezed. The screaming stopped.

“That was a headache scream. Happens sometimes when we do the braids too tight. I am still not very good at braiding, not nearly as good as her mother.” On cue,

Des moved her hands away from her ears and down to the tray. The room was quiet again.

I shifted my weight and cleared my throat. “Mr. Silver, sorry to intrude on your business, but I overheard about a package, and I am not sure if you knew that you had a box on your doorstep, and I…”

“Oh, sweet Jesus, I do? I didn’t see it from the door. Course, I haven’t been outside in a couple of days,” George said the last part under his breath as he rushed toward the door.

“Here, hold this open for me,” he directed as he walked onto the front stoop, the storm door resting against his massive thigh on his bad leg as he reached down to pick up the package. I walked over and held the metal door open with one arm so he could squeeze by me. The air outside was crisp and refreshing, and the sun had just set in front of their house, casting an orange glow on the fields across the road.

The large box—a 24 inch square, I knew from work—bowed at the bottom. He set it down in the middle of the room.

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“Oh Lord, I hope these didn’t get rusty,” George said as he walked into the kitchenette and opened a drawer.

“You see, I lose my investment if these get damaged.” He walked toward me with a serrated bread knife. Ten minutes ago this would have been menacing but not now. He kneeled on the carpet like a kid in elementary school and started to saw where the tape met the cardboard.

“I think we might be OK, Des,” he said, grabbing a handful of whatever was in the box. Come over here and see if you agree.” Des wasn’t going anywhere. He motioned to me.

I walked over slowly. The box was full of small keys, thousands of them.

George handed one to me.

“They are for filing cabinets and desks,” he said. “The kind you managers might have at work.”

I examined the key. It was cheaply made and had numbers and letters, codes like

JK84 etched into the front.

“All we gotta do is match up all these keys with the individual envelope that has the same number on it.” He riffled through the box and dug out two freezer-sized plastic bags stuffed with haphazardly arranged inch-long yellow envelopes with black numbers written on them. They did not seem to be in any order.

“I would have been in trouble if my first shipment got ruined, man, oh, man,”

George shook his head. “I paid one hundred dollars for these keys, and when I send them

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back, all nicely arranged in their individual envelopes, they send me a check for two- fifty. Not bad, huh?” he asked, looking up at me.

“No, not at all,” I felt my face turn red as I lied. It would take ages to arrange these keys. Maybe a hundred hours.

“I gotta pay the return shipping, but that’s what, twenty bucks? I know that from working the package scale at work. So I’m up, what, one-thirty? Not bad, not bad. And one of these days, Des can help me, and we can do twice what I can do alone. So that’ll work out great, just great.”

The knot in my throat, which had lingered since I arrived, tightened and pulsed.

“Mr. Silver, it was so nice meeting you and your family, but I am afraid I need to get back. I’d like to get out to the main road before it is completely dark outside, so if you’ll excuse me,” I stammered. I handed him the thick yellow envelope. He didn’t take it. Instead he took one of the key envelopes out of the sealed bag, examined the number, and started rifling through the box of keys, looking at one and throwing it back into the box. Then another, and another. An endless game of go fish.

“I’m sure I’ll get a method for this eventually. That’s what I always did at work.

Found a quicker way to do my job while not sacrificing quality.” The line sounded like a line out of one of the employee reviews I had filed that morning.

“Have a seat and help me find a match, will you? You haven’t even had a cookie yet. Where are my manners? Des would have been feeding you before you had a chance to step inside.” He speaks like she’s gone, I thought, but she’s there, watching the

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woman solve the final puzzle. Lo’s head was flopped to the side, her back heaving up and down with weighty, rattling breaths.

“I don’t think I can stay,” I say. I chided myself for not saying what I meant, for adding words to soften the message. I’m going to make a crappy supervisor someday, I thought.

“I need you to sit down and help me find a match,” he said. His tone was friendly but authoritative.

“I mean, I please need you to sit down and help me find a match,” he said. “I need to get an idea of how long this will take when Des is well enough to help me.”

I sat. I sat cross-legged on the threadbare carpet, my ski coat tucked under me, my hands curled inside as if they were cold, despite the balminess of the room and the sweat dripping down my back. I sat and watched as he dumped out half the box of keys, which clinked like coins cascading from a slot machine that just hit the jackpot. He handed me an envelope with numbers and letters on it, and asked me my number and told me his so we could look for the two keys at once. We combed through the pile, squinting, picking and tossing back, like I used to do with my grandmother when we searched for corners on her 750 piece puzzles. Only this was like putting together a puzzle with identical looking pieces, no corners, and doing it with a stranger. The numbers were only printed on one side of the keys, so we flipped, looked, tossed, tried again.

We worked in silence. I was careful not to sigh. I repeated our key numbers like a mantra under my breath. My discomfort in the house was replaced by a fear we would

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never find a match. Ten minutes in, or maybe it was just five, I removed my coat and laid it down next to the yellow envelope.

“Maybe the keys we need are still in there,” I offered, gesturing toward the half- full box.

“There are only two hundred combinations,” he said. “There are duplicate keys, so we should have found a match for at least one by now.” He rubbed his forehead with the heels of both hands. Alex Trebec introduced Double Jeopardy. Lo’s breathing was still heavy. Des was staring at the ceiling. We looked for a few more minutes. I had to keep looking at my key to remember the number. They started to run together. LI83,

L138. No match.

“We’ll find one soon, and then you’ll come up with a method. You can put them in order, or find the keys that match first, or maybe you can get a neighbor to come by and help?” I offered.

We worked in silence for a few more minutes. This was, quite possibly, the worst job ever.

“God damn it!” George yelled. I stopped muttering my key number. He dumped out the rest of the box, creating a mountain of keys on top of the silver sea we had already created.

He moaned. A deep moan that filled the room and startled Lo, who seemed to wake up. I was afraid she would begin screaming again.

“We’ll find one, we’ll find one,” I said, spreading the new pile out, looking hard.

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“God damn scam this is. God damn scam. Should have known. Should have picked the coupon verification job.”

He hung his head down. I stared at the top of his head and saw a thick pink scar that sliced across his small bald spot down toward his left ear. It had healed but was bulbous, raw and pink against his black skin.

“It was my fault, you know. Our accident. I didn’t see the pick-up coming over the hill. It was always a bad intersection, a two-way stop on a back road that had mostly four-way stops, but that doesn’t excuse it. We had been arguing, me and Des. We were arguing about Lo. Des had been thinking that we should consider sending her away, to a hospital or a home. Her reasoning was that we wouldn’t be able to take care of her forever anyway. I had said no way, that Lo only knew our home, and us, and we couldn’t abandon her. She yelled at me and said I was at work all day, that I didn’t understand the extent of Lo’s care, day in and out. The diapers and feedings and things. We’d had these conversations before, but Des was more serious this time. She told me she had started looking at group homes in Akron. She wanted me to visit one with her. I yelled at her.

That’s what we were talking about when the truck hit. That was God. He was telling us to shut up. He was telling me to shut up.” He had tears in his eyes as he looked around the room, as if he were searching for help living in the clapboard walls.

“And this?” he said, pointing to the yellow envelope next to me. “They had you to drive forty-minutes to give me this. The end of my salary? Who gives a crap. But the benefits? You’re in Human Resources, what does self-insurance cost? A thousand a month? I will only have to sort through 40 million keys to keep Des in her top-notch

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rehab program. Not your fault though, not the company’s fault. Not a fault, just a problem.”

George rested his head on his forearms supported by his knees. He looked smaller in the house when he sat this way, surrounded by his keys. The worthless sea of silver keys.

I stood up.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I am sure there are places you can go for help. Do you want me to help you find places? There are programs, there is Medicaid. I can try and help you, George,” I offered, my voice shaking.

George didn’t look at me.

“Not your job,” he said. “I thank you for trying to help, for coming inside. Most people drop things off on the stoop and don’t even knock. Even the church people don’t knock. They’ll bring us a bag of groceries, and then I see them run by the window back to their cars. People want to help us, but they don’t want to see us.”

I didn’t know what to say. I said good-bye to Des and Lo and pulled the storm door closed behind me so it wouldn’t slam shut. I walked down the ramp to my new car, got in, and turned around at the end of his gravel driveway. I saw his old tan Buick, the weeds growing up behind his rear tires. It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized

I had forgotten to get his signature. I had left the envelope on the carpet next to the keys.

I would work three more months for the company. Seth said I didn’t show much promise of being an Human Resources supervisor; he had concerns I would not be able

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“to let people go” or deliver tough news. We had delivered a lot of tough news to employees that year. I was paid too much to just do clerical work, so we agreed to part ways. It was fine by me.

One evening, probably a year after I left the company, after I had decided to go law school, I was driving, not particularly close to George’s house but close enough to think about him, and I decided to try and find Rural Route 4. I remembered a couple of landmarks, turned around in people’s driveways once or twice, and came upon the yellow house on the hill. The sun has just set, and I stopped my car on the side of the road. The blinds on the picture window were open and the blue screen on the television flickered inside, giving the house an almost nuclear glow. A figure lumbered past the window, like a man walking in front of a movie screen. George loomed as large in that house as I had remembered. I looked for the two chairs, but I saw no one but George, tending to the night’s housekeeping or perhaps pacing, his movements deliberate but unknown. My heart raced at the absence of the two women. I sat there for a few minutes, watching and waiting. As I turned forward to put my car into drive, I noticed a For Sale sign on the side of the hill, almost obscured by the grass that grew in front of it, but visible among the weeds. I looked back up at the house, wondering, of course, what this meant for him, for all of them, for us, when I saw George go into the back bedroom and come out, wheeling one chair in front of the television, and then the other. I breathed. He disappeared into dark kitchen, turned on the overhead light, and I drove into the darkness for home.