Jessica Chiarella - And Again

I stick around when Penny heads home, and Roger takes the boys to the cafeteria for snacks. I know it is the wrong time for this, for any of it. I’m exhausted, so Lucy must be half-dead. But I’m worried, in a way that I’ve never been before, that this might be the last chance for honesty between my sister and me. She must know it too, because all I have to do is sit on her bed before she starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, wiping at her eyes, making them even puffier. “I didn’t want to lie to you.”

“I know,” I reply. “Sam was always the one person you never could say no to.”

“It wasn’t that,” she replies. “I was there, Hannah. Both times. I watched him lose his dad, and then nearly lose you. And I kept his secret, I lied to you, because he deserves to be forgiven after everything he’s been through. And I knew you wouldn’t be able to.” We’re both silent for a moment. Is this what they think of me, the people who love me? Am I this vicious? I must be, because while it hurts to think of Sam, sometimes I relish in the pain because it allows me to hate him. It lets me ignore the damage I’ve done.

“I wish I could,” I reply. I think of our parents, half a world away from both of us, saving other people when their daughters need so badly to be saved. “Anyway, he’s probably better off.” The knowledge lingers, how David and I never even considered using condoms in all of our time together. How I will never be a perfect wife, a wife like Lucy. Maybe that is why I let Sam go, in the end.

Lucy brushes a hand down the side of my face. “What is it, Hannah?” she asks.

“I don’t think any of us can have children,” I reply.

“What?” She sits up a little straighter in bed, propping herself up with her arms. “What are you talking about?”

“The SUBs, all of us in the pilot program. And I think we all know it, too.”

“What makes you say that? Have the doctors said something?”

“No,” I reply. “I don’t think they know. It’s this feeling…” I trail off, try to find a way to explain. “You know I got pregnant once, right?”

Lucy nods. “Freshman year.”

“Yeah. It was like walking into a house and forgetting to lock the front door. You know? You’re walking around, hours later, doing something else and you just realize. The front door is unlocked. That’s how being pregnant was for me. All of a sudden, I knew, it was a fact. I didn’t even take a test before I made the appointment.” I glance over at the little bassinet next to the bed, at the gurgling, soft little girl inside. “That’s sort of how this feels. I know it, without having to be told.”

“Jesus,” Lucy says. “That’s awful.” I laugh a little.

“It’s karma,” I reply, reveling in the dark irony of it. “I think it’s Mother Nature being a rotten, vindictive bitch because we finally beat her at her own game.”

There’s a puddle of hot blood in my underwear. I can feel that something is wrong right away, there’s a tight burn right between my hips, and the rest of me feels sweaty and tense. I find the blood in the bathroom, with my jeans bunched around my knees. I blink. No. One blink. Again and again, because I can’t even form the word, can’t even whisper it. No, no, no.

It happens fast, all in a gush of pain, a river of it, doubling me over. I grip the edge of the sink, my hand clammy and sliding against the smooth marble. I can hear the small sound of something falling into the water beneath me. At first I think it can be saved, like a bird’s egg fallen from a nest, that if it is kept warm and safe it might still become the thing that it’s meant to be. I rummage around under the sink and there’s nothing to catch it with, nothing I can use to rescue it. Instead I peer into the rusty water in the toilet bowl and it’s there, that little clot of tissue. It’s a mass of pulp, an alien thing produced from an alien body, a body that was never meant to create anything because it itself was not created by any natural means. It’s a feeling like falling down; everything in me has fallen, every bit of me.

Tom knocks on the door. I’ve been in here for a while. I wonder what someone does with a thing like this, a thing that is something and nothing at once. All potential, unrealized. I could tell Tom. I could go to the hospital. I could lie on the floor and pretend to be paralyzed. All of it seems futile. There’s nothing left to do but to get rid of it, like a dead goldfish, to staunch the bleeding with a maxi pad and open the door to face Tom. I tell him it’s the flu. A stomach bug. Something vague that will keep him at a distance, lest he catch it from me.

I drift, in those next few days. I find an old bottle of sleeping pills in Tom’s cabinet and take two at a time, until he has to shake me awake in the evenings when he gets home from work. It frightens the kids, to see their father frightened. Even Jack keeps his distance now. Tom is worried, always worried, wants me to see Dr. Shah, or my ob-gyn. I know what he thinks, that I’m defective, that there’s something wrong with my SUB. I can’t bear to tell him that he’s right.

When I don’t want to sleep anymore, I curl up on the couch and watch Stratford Pines , or go into the yard and lie on my back in the grass and listen to the trees. I want to cry, but I’m not sure this body knows how. It’s difficult to conjure that pressure, that physical insistence. I think of the phantom tears I used to cry, the ones Cora would dab from my face with those embroidered handkerchiefs of hers. My body, always a betrayer, always giving me the opposite of what I need.

The next few days are worse, because once the shock of it wears off, once my new body bounces right back into humming and clicking in its normal, well-oiled efficiency, I begin to feel it. Somewhere deep inside me, there is the tiniest kernel of relief. And I hate it, and love it, that feeling. Hate it because it is selfish and cruel, it puts me in league with all the women who wish their children away, who leave their infants locked in cars on hot summer days, or feed them too much cough syrup to quiet them, or abandon them in front of fire stations. And I love it too, that feeling, because it’s proof I’m still alive. That there is still something for me to want in this world, even if it’s to want all the wrong things.

I climb the stairs to the attic, pulling out my artifacts and pressing each between the skin of my palms. There is no thrill of electricity, as if something has waved a magic wand and rendered them inert. It feels like loss, surely, as if the little embryo took the keys to my secret world when it left my body, as if it pulled all the dreams out of me as it left. But another thought occurs to me, as I sit there. Perhaps the dream world has receded because this world has begun to unlock itself. I think of all sorts of possibilities that could exist for a woman risen from the dead, all of the ideas that occurred to me in that jail cell, when I realized I could disappear. I think of open water and mountain tops. Things I’ve never allowed myself to dream, after that night in college when the stick turned pink, when the choices weren’t mine alone anymore. All of this, the accident, the transfer, even my miscarriage, have all conspired to give me the chance to do what I’ve wanted to do since I can remember. How could anyone fault me now, after I have been so torn from my life and it has healed itself with me on the outside? I have been given the world now. How could anyone fault me for leaving?

David Jr.’s arm is in a navy blue cast that reaches from his palm to his elbow. It’s a completely helpless feeling, for my son to be injured every time I see him. To be so far away, avoiding my district and all of those unanswerable questions and probably subpoenas, unable to protect him because I can’t even protect myself.