Claire Watkins - Battleborn

The procedure itself lasted under ten minutes, a fact that the nurses often reiterated and that proved technically accurate but did little to capture the character of those ten minutes. A nurse’s aide held my hand. I envisioned Sam sitting out with the fathers. I wondered unkindly whether his presence deflated them. How, I wondered, did they reconcile the facility waiting room with a white, college-educated, clean-shaven twenty-six-year-old—the kind of man their now-wayward daughters would bring home one day, if they turned things around? Later, Sam told me he wouldn’t have been in the waiting room then. He went for a walk, he said, though there was nowhere to walk really, so he just weaved up and down the rows of cars in the mall parking lot, waiting for me to call.

Afterward, they took us to a room and had us lie on cots. Some of the girls threw up there, including me. The aides gave us apple juice and two cookies for our blood sugar and a prescription for birth control so we wouldn’t be repeat customers. I have told this story occasionally, to my sister and a few others. But Ezra was the only person who ever laughed at that last part. Another reason why I loved him, I suppose. Anyway, the whole experience was as awful as one would expect, and no more so. It was nothing I couldn’t do again.

This was why my sister came every night, and why she brought the Miracle.

After she left with the Miracle in her birthday getup, Carly called. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Promise you won’t smoke or drink anymore.”

“What for?”

“You never know,” she said buoyantly.

“Actually, Car, the sad thing is how often you do know.”

“Come on,” she said. “For me.”

“This is fucked up,” I said; then I promised.

It should have been easy to quit; I’d only ever smoked with him, for him. It wasn’t easy—I was anxious and found I didn’t know what to do with my hands—but I did it. I stopped drinking, too, and took to having lemonade with my peanut butter cups. I read faster, and I became more disturbed by the things I read. Often, I had to stop. I’d set the book aside and look at my naked body. I imagined tumbling through plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche. I distended my stomach so it rose from the surface of the water. It was too early for that, of course. Those cells were barely the size of a cranberry, or so Carly told me. Sometimes I went underwater to see how long I could stay there. I opened my eyes, saw those brownblack wrappers moving above me like his boats, like insects alighted on the surface of the Truckee. I saw him there. I wished I didn’t, but I did.

When Carly was pregnant with the Miracle she tried never to become upset or angry, always to be calm. That was why the Miracle turned out so even. But it seemed all I was was upset and angry. It is such a short distance from the heart to the womb. I could see foul chemicals injecting into Cranberry. What if the first feelings she ever felt were loss and fear and anger? It must sour a person profoundly to have these as first feelings. This is probably what happened to me.

The Museum of Love Lost could have a Mother Wing. Arranged in reverse chronological order, it might start with an archive of yellowing newspaper articles: Fatal Accident Causes Major Power Outage ; Thousands in Northwest Reno Without Electricity after Car Slams into Power Pole . (Ezra, when I told him: “I remember that day. We got out of school early.”) From there a visitor might move through a catalogue of all the matchbooks our mother gave Carly and me when she visited us at our grandmother’s in Sun Valley. Carly kept hers in a mason jar on the dresser we shared—booklets from Sparky’s, Bully’s, Crosby’s, little boxes from the Bonanza, the Horseshoe, the Polo Lounge. I burned my matches up as soon as our mother left, not because I wanted to destroy them, but because I couldn’t resist the smell of them burning, or the satisfying snap of those chalky heads against that grainy strip.

There might be pungent tubes of the same variety of henna our mother used to dye our brown hair red when we were girls, back when we still lived with her, because she wanted us to look more like her. Here is a photo of us sitting in the gravel driveway in front of our trailer, our hair swirled high on our heads with the rust-colored clay, letting, she said, the sun do its thing. We are maybe five and ten. I am wearing only white cotton underpants.

The Mother Wing might end with a display of dried, pressed sprigs of sage and wild mint from the drainage ditch behind the trailer, which we used to pick by the armful and bring to our mother while she slept.

But most likely, the Mother Wing would be completely empty.

Carly came over the next night with the Miracle dressed in a fuzzy brown bear outfit. Small bear ears peeked up from the hood, and soft claw mittens from the arms, and a tail on the ass wiggled bearlike as she crawled.

“Why is she wearing that?” I asked.

“She likes it,” Carly said. “Watch this.” She asked the Miracle, “Who’s a bear?”

The Miracle bared her newest teeth and dropped her mother’s cell phone to display her claws. “Who’s a bear?” Carly said again.

The Miracle squealed, snapped her teeth together and then roared a too-happy roar.

“That’s adorable,” I said, and it was.

Carly looked pleased. She said, “Maybe you should get out of the bath.”

“Some days I thank God I can lock myself in my apartment and no one has to be around me,” I said. “What if I always have those days? A baby is there. All the time.” These things were just occurring to me.

“Have you thought any more about that docent program?” she said. “I could still get you an interview.”

“I’ve already started,” I said, waving her to my nightstand.

“What’s all this?”

“Don’t touch it.”

She hovered over the things Ezra had emptied from his pockets our last night together. They were arranged on the nightstand just as he’d left them, waiting to be labeled and mounted on acid-free paper: a credit card receipt from a bar up the street. The chewed cap of a pen. Some change and a five-dollar bill creased in the middle like an accordion, which he used for a trick where he’d make it look like Abraham Lincoln was smiling or frowning, depending on how he held it. A near-empty sack of tobacco.

“What is it?” Carly called to me.

“Family heritage,” I said. “In case Cranberry wants to know who her father was. There he is, girlie: generous tipper, oral fixater, Civil War buff, roller of exquisitely proportioned cigarettes.”

Carly returned to the bathroom, ineffably bright-eyed. “Do you really think it’s a girl?”

“God. I hope not.”

Carly knelt on the floor beside the tub. She put her hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “Alex and I could help you. Cranberry and the Miracle could be friends. Like us. It could be like when we were kids. Before things got bad.”

I said, “Things were always bad.”

“They weren’t,” said Carly. “You were too young. But they weren’t.”

“Why are you defending her?”

The Miracle screeched.

“I’m not.” Carly stood and lifted her daughter, holding her like a shield. “It’s just—do you have to be so hard on everyone?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

The Miracle took her mother’s earring into her mouth. Carly extracted it gingerly. “You make him sound like some sort of flimflam man.”

“That’s what he is, Car. A flimflam man.”