by Jim Nelson
Hanna, wide-eyed, looked to her mother for help, but her mother merely nodded. “Just do what the doctor says.”
Hanna’s nausea was replaced with a kind of disgust she’d never felt before, a terrible anticipation of violation. With her privates spread open by a gleaming metal device, Dr. Mayhew stared up into Hanna’s body with the aid of a penlight, then reached inside Hanna with two gloved fingers. She ran them around the way the dentist ran his fingers along the inside of her gums to check for cavities. Finally, Dr. Mayhew snapped the gloves off her hands and told Hanna to get dressed. Again Hanna tasted the sticky saltiness in her mouth, feeling vaguely ill at what had just transpired.
Dr. Mayhew wrote an order on a pad of paper, tore it off, and handed it to Hanna’s mother. “On your way out, stop by the blood draw on the second floor.”
More tests? Hanna thought. Every visit to Dr. Mayhew’s ended with fresh blood drawn with a spiny needle. Dr. Mayhew would call Hanna’s parents later that week with the results, results never shared with Hanna.
“Hanna,” Dr. Mayhew said washing up, “why don’t you sit outside for a moment while your mother and I talk.” After drying her hands, she offered Hanna a lollipop from a glass jar. This was the routine conclusion of every visit to Dr. Mayhew’s office, Hanna sitting in the hall sucking on a pea-sized sugar-free lollipop while the doctor discussed the examination with Hanna’s mother.
Hanna tied her last shoe, accepted the candy with a soft “Thank you,” and then said, “This is for you.” She placed a paper crane on the counter beside the sink. On the underside of the crane Hanna had written the number 16. Dr. Mayhew noted the crane with a questioning smile, saying “Thank you” as Hanna went to the examination room door.
Hand on the doorknob, Hanna turned around. “Why can’t I hear?” she said.
“Hanna,” her mother said, “just give us a moment.”
“I want to hear too,” Hanna insisted.
“We’ll talk about it in the car,” Hanna’s mother said. Hanna knew there would be nothing discussed in the car other than the preparations for dinner that night.
Hanna considered her options. She could put up a fit in the examination room. What would her mother do? Her parents had never physically punished her. Would she take away her allowance? Ignorance no longer seemed worth twenty-five cents a week.
Hanna returned to the examination table. She used the stepping stool to climb up and onto the wrinkled paper. “I know about pons viviparous hemotrophism,” she said to the doctor.
Dr. Mayhew suppressed an amused smile. “Do you now,” she said.
“Am I okay?” she asked.
Dr. Mayhew looked to Hanna’s mother for permission, who reluctantly and silently gave it.
“All signs say you’re healthy.” Dr. Mayhew was tall for a woman, taller than Hanna’s mother, and spoke down to Hanna even though Hanna was on the table. “You’re well into the third month of pons anno. It’s a little early for your age, but not out of the ordinary. You should expect to start showing in the next few weeks.”
Hanna didn’t know what the Latin meant. More words to look up when she got home.
“Will it be a boy or a girl?” Hanna felt a bit brave talking to Dr. Mayhew in this fashion.
Dr. Mayhew again looked to Hanna’s mother for permission, and received it.
“We can’t test the gender for a few more weeks,” Dr. Mayhew said. “It’s up to your parents to decide if they want to know the sex of their child before it’s born.”
“What if I want to know?”
Dr. Mayhew rolled the round stool over to Hanna and sat before her. Now Dr. Mayhew spoke to Hanna face-to-face.
“Hanna, you are the pons, the bearer of your parents’ child.” She reached forward and touched Hanna in the midsection, where she’d probed just a few minutes earlier. “This here,” she applied pressure to the tender bump growing under Hanna’s skin, “this is your parents’, not yours. They get to decide.”
“I’m just a box for it,” Hanna said. “Like a carton of milk.”
Dr. Mayhew suppressed another smile—did she think Hanna was being cute?
“You’re not a carton of milk,” Dr. Mayhew said.
“I’m like a hen sitting on another hen’s egg.”
“You are your mother’s surrogate, yes,” she said. “Be it God or Nature, that is how human reproduction works.”
Hanna’s mother announced, “Thank you, doctor.” Then, “Hanna, say goodbye to Dr. Mayhew.”
“I want to talk to you more,” Hanna said to the doctor.
“Hanna—“ her mother warned.
“I want to ask you a question,” Hanna said to Dr. Mayhew again. “Alone.”
“Our time is up,” her mother said.
“I wanna ask a question!” Hanna snapped.
After a moment to gather herself, Hanna’s mother spoke in an even tone. “Your father and I decided thirteen years ago we’d treat you like a normal daughter. And we’re very proud of how you’ve turned out. All we ask is you show us some consideration. Can you do that?”
Hanna, quivering, said, “Yes.”
“What do you say then?”
“I’m sorry for yelling,” Hanna said softly. “May I please talk with Dr. Mayhew alone?”
Hanna’s mother took a breath, emotionless, then stepped out to the hall, closing the door behind her.
Hanna couldn’t believe it. She’d never been left alone with Dr. Mayhew, never left alone with another adult at all, save a few times with Aunt Azami or Uncle Rick. Now she was there with Dr. Mayhew and granted permission to ask anything she wanted.
“My mother said I will pass away,” Hanna said. “She calls it ‘the finality.’”
Dr. Mayhew nodded. “At the end of pons anno, when the child is born, the cerebrum funiculus is cut severing your tie with the infant—“
“You mean the umbilical cord?” Hanna asked, recalling the term from Mother & Baby.
“No,” Dr. Mayhew said, “an umbilical cord connects a mother to her bridge daughter. Here, look.”
Dr. Mayhew took a plastic scale model from the rear counter, a headless, armless, legless midsection of a naked pregnant female. It was cut lengthwise to reveal the uterus, placenta, ovaries, and fetus within. Dr. Mayhew used the tip of her ballpoint pen like a lecturer’s pointer.
“When you were in utero, an umbilical cord connected you to your mother. Now, while you were in there, a pouch of cells in your uterus began developing. This pouch of cells is the genetically identical embryo within you today.”
“A twin,” Hanna said.
“The gemellius,” Dr. Mayhew said. “Your genetic uniform, although its gender is not yet determined.” She closed her eyes and waved a hand. “It’s complicated.” Then she placed her hand on Hanna’s belly again. “Because you both are genetically uniform, there’s no need for a placental barrier.” Hanna didn’t know what that meant, another phrase to look up at home. “That’s why you don’t have an umbilical cord.”
Dr. Mayhew turned the plastic model around. Like a magician’s box, the other side of the model displayed the internals of a bridge daughter: the uterus, similar to a normal woman’s, but no ovaries, no Fallopian tubes, and no placenta. The fetus was connected to the bridge daughter by a thick eggplant-colored cable that originated from somewhere in the model’s spine.
“The gemellius and you are in a symbiotic relationship,” Dr. Mayhew said. “That means you depend on each other. You cannot live without it and it cannot live without you. When it reaches the fetal stage, it’ll begin processing hormones in your bloodstream and, in turn, emit a different set of hormones back into your body.”
Hormones—another word to look up in the encyclopedia at home.
“The cerebrum funiculus inside you is like an umbilical cord,” Dr. Mayhew continued, “but it connects your brain and spinal cord to the fetus’ cortex.” She ran the pen up and down the eggplant-colored cable inside the model, curled like a telephone cord. “
At birth, when the funiculus is severed, your brain functions will cease and you’ll pass away.” Dr. Mayhew said it matter-of-factly, as though it was no more dramatic than pulling a tooth.
“You mean I die.”
“The finality. What started fourteen years earlier in your mother’s womb concludes with the birth of the gemellius, your genetic duplicate.”
Dr. Mayhew’s authority was damning, but Hanna remained unsatisfied. “Why does the funcu—funick—“
“Funiculus.”
“Why does it have to be cut?”
“Once the infant exits your body, the connection must be severed. The infant won’t survive outside your body with it attached.”
Hanna mustered her next words. “Then maybe don’t cut it.”
“It’s a symbiotic relationship only up to a point,” Dr. Mayhew said. “It has to be cut at birth. There’s no alternative.”
“Doctors can change hearts and give people new legs,” Hanna said. “Why can’t they fix this?”
“What do you mean, ‘fix this?’”
“Fix it,” Hanna insisted. She waved a hand at the plastic model. “Stop this from happening.”
Dr. Mayhew returned the pen to her breast pocket, replaced the model on the counter, and rose from the rolling stool. She had an air about her now, as though the conversation had become distasteful. “There’s nothing to fix,” Dr. Mayhew said. “This is going exactly as intended, Hanna. This is how humans have procreated for a hundred thousand years.”
“But it’s not fair,” Hanna said softly, almost to herself.
Dr. Mayhew opened the door. Hanna’s mother waited in the hall, purse over her shoulder, fuming.
“Vitamin B6 will take care of that nausea,” Dr. Mayhew said to Hanna’s mother. “Make sure she stays hydrated. And don’t forget to have that blood drawn before you go.”
Six
Hanna looked up Sadako Sasaki in the children’s encyclopedia her parents allowed her to keep in her room. There she found the story Aunt Azami had relayed to her, but with dates and more detail. The entry confirmed Sadako was a bridge daughter. When Hanna looked up “Bridge Daughter” in the A–D volume of the encyclopedia, she discovered that page had been removed, sliced out with a razor blade so close to the binding she never would have known it was missing.
The children’s encyclopedia had no entry for pons anno, but her dictionary defined Anno Domini as “the year of our Lord.” Dr. Mayhew said she’d entered the third month of pons anno. Maybe, she theorized, I have nine months remaining.
*
Hanna was not in the habit of shoplifting, but now she had stolen two things from Cullers’ Pharmacy. First it was the pregnancy test, now a pocket notebook, a pad of blank lined paper bound between indigo leatherette covers. Although her parents supplied her a weekly allowance (a progressive idea, something not traditionally given to bridge daughters), her mother kept Hanna’s meager stipend in her purse and only allowed Hanna to purchase approved items. The pregnancy test obviously had to be obtained covertly. The notebook would have been innocent enough, but it too would soon hold a kind of secret Hanna did not want to share with her parents.
Alone in her bedroom, Hanna printed her name and address and phone number on the inside cover of the notebook, so it could be returned in case she ever mislaid it. At the top of the first page, using the cleanest cursive script she could muster, she wrote
Tsuru
The night of Dr. Mayhew’s examination, Hanna stayed up late making paper cranes just as Aunt Azami had instructed her. She wanted to fall into bed, bury her face in the pillow, and cry, but she resolved she would not give in so easily. She thought of her friend Alondra, who’d been so strong when she was pregnant. Before the birth, she’d told Hanna she was moving to Massachusetts to spend the next few years with her grandparents. Hanna thought she was terribly strong to make such a move. Plus, she was due to give birth in just a month or so. Travelling across the country and living in a new city was a huge change. Hanna had always been a bit jealous of Alondra’s courage. Could she be that strong?
Folding her twentieth crane at her desk, it dawned on Hanna what a fool she’d been. Alondra was a bridge daughter. She wasn’t in Massachusetts. She was dead. Hanna’s parents no longer socialized with Alondra’s parents. No doubt Alondra’s parents were raising a new baby, the child Alondra had given them right before she died.
Head down, Hanna folded faster and with more focus, burning off the worry-energy and determined to become as good as Aunt Azami at making cranes. The night of her birthday, she had decided she would number each crane so she would know when she reached the one thousandth. Through trial-and-error, she learned exactly where to write the number on the sheet of origami paper so it would be visible on the underside of the left wing when finished folding. She wrote it in the tiniest of numerals to keep her serialization scheme from tainting the beauty of the tsuru. By the time she reached number thirty, Hanna had her little system down pat.
Then, in the pocket notebook she’d stolen from Cullers’ Pharmacy, she wrote consecutive numbers down the of the first page, each on its own line. Most of the numbered lines were blank. That meant she had kept the paper crane for herself. Beside some of the numbers, she wrote a name. For number 16 she wrote Dr. Mayhew. For number 14 she wrote Mother and beside number 15 she wrote Father. Mr. Cullers, the owner of the pharmacy, received number 17, unaware that the gift of a crane was a furtive partial payment for the notebook Hanna had pocketed from the stationery aisle.
Hanna doubted her wish would come true when she reached one thousand cranes. It would be the same wish she’d made as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake. She did not believe in magic candles and she did not believe in miraculous paper cranes, but she was willing to try anything if it meant one more breath of life.
*
When the second invitation for Cheryl’s bridge party arrived in the mail, Hanna fought her mother hard for permission to attend. Hanna’s mother steadfastly refused. Hanna switched tactics and pled with her father for intercession. Her father was as reluctant as her mother, but agreed with Hanna’s logic. If Cheryl was not going to be with the living for much longer, Hanna deserved a chance to say goodbye.
“I’ll agree to it,” her mother finally conceded, fuming, “but you can’t tell Cheryl she’s passing away. Not one word about her finality. That’s not for you to say. Promise?”
“I promise,” Hanna said softly.
“Liz registered at Macy’s,” her mother said, flicking the invitation with her finger. “We’ll go tomorrow after lunch.”
“I’ll make a gift,” Hanna said, thinking it would appease her mother, which it did not.
Two days later, Hanna’s father drove Hanna to the Vannberg house for the bridge party. “That was nice of you to put together those flowers for Cheryl,” he said from behind the steering wheel. “And the paper birds too. I’m sure she’ll like them.”
The bucket of flowers Uncle Rick had brought were just about done for. Most had wilted and shed their petals days before. Hanna had salvaged for Cheryl a decent bouquet of carnations and sagging California poppies. They surrounded the last sunflower Uncle Rick had included in the farrago of blooms. Hanna was not fond of sunflowers. They had almost no scent to enjoy. Their centers were rough and scaly, like an alligator’s hide. Hanna figured she could gift the sunflower to Cheryl and be done with it, throwing in some color to liven it up. She knew none of them would last much longer before wilting and turning crinkly brown.
The tsuru, however, had been a fair amount of work. She’d stayed up the night before without watching any television to complete twenty of them. She recorded their numbers in her pocket notebook—64 to 84—and printed “Cheryl Vannberg” on each line.
Hanna said to her father, “I wish she’d asked me when we got the first invitation,” meaning her mother. “Why don’t I get to decide if I go to a party?”
“Well…” Hanna’s father made it a practice to see th
ings from other people’s perspective. Or, Hanna later realized, to ask people to see things from other people’s perspective. “Look at it from your mother’s point of view. She and Liz don’t see things eye-to-eye. I don’t know if you remember, but we were at their house a few years ago for dinner. Liz and your mother kind of got into it at the table.”
Hanna did recall that, but didn’t understand what they were arguing over. It had to do with raising children.
“Can I ask you something?” Hanna said.
“Of course you can,” he said.
“When were you going to tell me?”
Hanna’s father blew out air from pursed lips. He’d not seen that one coming. “I promise, we were going to tell you soon. I think your mother wanted to wait until after the birthday party.” Seeing Hanna’s dissatisfaction with his answer, he added, “You know, some parents tell their bridge daughters when they’re young. And those bridge daughters are expected to play a certain role in the family.”
“Like Erica across the street?”
“That’s right. But your mother wanted to raise you like a normal child. She has strong opinions about how bridge daughters should be raised. She did a lot of research before you were born.”
Really? “What kind of research?”
“Just her own research,” he said. “As you know, your mother and your Uncle Rick were raised in a…peculiar way. Your grandmother raised her bridge daughters different than most people would. Your mother has taken your grandmother’s ideas and mixed them with more traditional thinking. A blend, kind of.” He quickly added, “But that’s different than what Cheryl’s mother is up to. Completely different.”
“But Cheryl’s mom does all these great things for her. They go on trips together, and Disneyland, and they get their hair done, and—“
“Liz is lying to Cheryl every day,” he said evenly. “Liz is telling Cheryl that when the baby is born, they’ll both raise it. They’ve fooled that little girl.” Hanna’s father said it with some bitterness. “Liz is actually doing something very cruel to Cheryl.”