Nancy Kress: Nothing Human

He wrote:

There are things you cannot get your mind around. You go to school, grow up, go to college and law school, get a job. You marry, love, fight, divorce, make partner, marry again, divorce again. People you know have children, or career changes, or deaths. Every change in your life feels enormous at the time, and in the context of your life it is enormous, cataclysmic, life-altering. But not unexpected. Other people around you are experiencing these same things, rich people and poor people, famous and obscure, quietly or with maximum theatrics. Each cataclysm, you see as you get older, is just part of the normal pattern of life. Disappointing or exhilarating, at least what happens to you is universal. Possibly even banal.

Then something happens so far off the expected, outside the pattern, the ordinary turned into the unthinkable, that your mind simply rejects it. It cannot be. It isn’t happening. Impossible. No way.

Like the aliens.

Or Lillie.

He looked at the paper, and tore it up. The lame paragraph didn’t even come close. What had happened couldn’t be expressed in words. There were no words.

Of course, that had been the whole point.

“I’m pregnant,” Barbara said, and grinned at him like a six-year-old who had just tied her shoelaces for the first time.

Shit.

“Don’t look like that, Keith,” she said, her voice already trembling. Then, with a sudden show of what passed in her for anger, “Just because you’re my brother doesn’t give you the power to judge me.”

“Of course it does,” Keith Anderson said. “Don’t spout these mindless slogans at me. Everyone has the right to judge actions according to belief and practicality. It’s called ‘using good judgment.’ “

Her eyes filled with tears, and Keith willed himself to patience. Softly, go softly. Be a good brother. She had always gotten upset too easily, even when they’d been small children. He knew that. Barbara was emotionally fragile.

So how was she going to cope alone with a baby?

He reached for her hand across her tiny kitchen table. Outside the dingy apartment window, someone on Amsterdam Avenue rattled garbage cans and cursed loudly. Cabs honked incessantly. “Tell me about it, Babs,” he said gently.

Instantly her tears evaporated. “You know I always wanted children. Then the years somehow went by and things happened and… well. You know.”

Keith knew. Her first husband the non-working narcissist happened, and her second husband the just-barely-this-side-of-the-law bankrupt happened, and a string of disastrous love affairs happened, and so Barbara was thirty-six and working as an office temp and, apparently, pregnant.

“Who’s the father, Babs?”

“That’s the best part. There isn’t one.”

“A virgin birth,” he said, before he knew he was going to speak. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

Barbara laughed and ran her hand through her short brown hair. It stood up in spikes. “No, an anonymous sperm donor. No man to interfere with us, bully us, upset Lillie and me.”

Lillie. Already this fetus was a person to her. Keith braced himself for the argument ahead. But she anticipated him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Keithers. But that’s taken care of, too. This fertility clinic took five of my eggs and fertilized them all, then chose one that doesn’t carry the genetic marker. The baby won’t get breast cancer.” She and Keith were both carriers; their mother had died of the disease.

When he remained silent she added, “I’m being very careful of Lillie. Yes, I’m positive it’s a girl, I had the amnio. I wanted to know.”

“How far along are you?”

“Three months already,” she said proudly, standing up and turning sideways. “I’m starting to show!”

She wasn’t. Skinny as always, impulsive as always, improvident as always. Keith looked around the cramped apartment in the bad neighborhood that was all she could afford. Paint peeled off the walls. He glimpsed a roach crawling in the dim crevice between stove and refrigerator. Outside the grimy window, kids who should have been in school sauntered along Amsterdam Avenue in the mellow sunshine.

“Barbara, how did you afford the in vitro fertilization? A woman in my office told me it took her and her husband three tries at nine thousand dollars a pop.”

She sat down again. “This clinic, it’s called ChildGive IVF Institute, is on a sliding income scale, very cheap. It’s because they’re part of some test.”

“A clinical trial? Who’s running it?”

“Oh, Keith, how should I know? And it doesn’t matter anyway. Stop sounding like a lawyer!”

“I am a lawyer. How did you learn about the clinic?”

“Ad in the paper. Keithers, please stop.”

Again he fought down impatience. “I can’t. I care about you. Have you thought how you’ll work and take care of the baby, too? Good day care is expensive.”

“Something will turn up, it always does. The Lord will provide. You have to trust in Him more.”

Keith stared at her helplessly. The Great Divide; they always seemed to run into it sooner or later. But was it really religion, or was it temperament? Trust in God was a great excuse for sloth and lack of planning.

So was the knowledge that you had a hard-working younger brother that wouldn’t let you go begging.

It would do no good to say so. Barbara wouldn’t hear him; she never did. And Keith was honest enough to admit that he needed her as much as she needed him. His marriage record was no better than hers. Two failures, and he never saw either Stacey or Meg. He , was childless, worked fourteen hours a day, would have been wary of trying again with a new woman even if he had had the time. At thirty-four, he was already romantically burned out. Barbara was the only family he had, or probably would have. Barbara and now this child.

He gazed at his sister, with her rumpled-up pixie cut and thin body and hopeful face. She wore jeans from the teen department and a T-shirt with a pictture of kittens. A child herself, perpetually.

“Let me show you the baby clothes I bought yesterday… they’re the most darling things you ever saw!” Barbara said, jumping up from the table so quickly that his tepid coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup. She didn’t notice.

Keith mopped up the coffee before she returned from the bedroom with a shopping bag. Then he sat and looked at pink sleepers and a hat with a fuzzy ball on top and impossibly tiny soft white shoes. As she chartered away, he nodded meaninglessly and tried to smile. This was his sister, and she was determined on having this baby no matter what, and the baby would be his only genetic stake in the next generation. His niece.

Lillie.

Barbara had an easy pregnancy, which was good because she had no health insurance and could not have afforded many complications. There was no morning sickness, no bleeding, none of possible worse horrors that Barbara insisted on reading about at the public library. She recited them all to Keith, who would much rather have not heard. He took her to dinner every Tuesday, slashing the time out of his logjammed schedule. He sent her a crib from Bloomingdale’s, and he inquired of a tax attorney at Wolf, Pfeiffer about various types of trust funds. The rest of the time he forgot his sister and defended his corporate clients.