“Oh my god, you believe me.”
Of course I do. Because everything, everything is sinking.
I briefly consider hanging up the call. I’m so scared, every instinct I have is screaming danger—but my other ones take over. The grade-school, the good-versus-bad, the knowledge that, if there’s even a chance I can save someone, I’ll regret not taking it.
“You said you wanted to meet?”
“I-in a public place. I mean, I didn’t say that before, but—in a public place, as soon as possible, please—”
“I can leave right now.”
“W—yes! Yes, please, in the park…”
“First off, you got a name?”
“I—it’s—Addy.”
My blood runs cold. Skinned knees and broken wooden frames, a lit match thrown into a pile of torn canvas. I love you, Addy. Black hair falling over a blue-and-white striped hoodie, pallid hands tracing a pentagram into the floor. Your parents shouldn’t have done that to you, Addy. Eyeliner running with tears, wiping it carefully to avoid her eyebrow piercing. I’m sorry, Addy… Addy… Addy…
Addy tells me which park she wants to meet at. And like a doomed idiot, I put on my pants, pick up my coat, and go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mama's Gonna Buy You a Diamond Ring
You couldn’t really call this place a park. It’s more like… a yard that someone lost control of. It still has the requisite benches, and I scan them until I see one occupied by a dark figure. She’s wearing a thick, fleecy duffel coat with some grungy turquoise flannel peeking out at the neck, dark hair falling over her face as she sits, hunched over a backpack in her lap.
She wanted to meet in a public place—that’s good for me, less likely to be a trap, but doesn’t eliminate the possibility completely. I walk up.
“Hi, it’s me—Harrietta Lee. The one you called. Can I sit next to you?”
Her head snaps up, limp black hair sliding off her face—a silver barbell through the left eyebrow. Piercing blue eyes.
She’s not Adrienne.
She’s not my Addy.
I don’t know if this plunging feeling in my chest, the one that settles at the base of my lungs like the last dregs of a bottle, is relief or disappointment. I keep searching her face again, finding details that don’t match up with my memories—her eyes don’t tilt down at the corners like Addy’s did, and she doesn’t have Addy’s barely crooked nose, or the pockmark just left of her chin from a childhood fall. It’s just some teenage girl cosplaying as my ex-girlfriend.
I stay standing.
“I—what’s wrong? Didn’t you ask to sit?” she says, her voice fragile.
“Y-yeah. Sorry, you just look like someone I used to know.”
“Addy, right?”
The urge to rock away from her swells up in my stomach. I stay stock-still, my face frozen in a slight frown. “…How do you know that?”
“Because, um—I don’t think that’s really my name. It was… given to me.”
“That eyebrow piercing. That was ‘given’ to you too?”
She reaches up to touch it, like she’d forgotten it was there. “Y-yes. It’s related to the reason I called you. I mean… it’s all related to the reason I called you.”
She sits up a little more, the backpack falling away from her stomach—it’s not the backpack she was hunched over.
She’s heavily, heavily pregnant.
Things… click, and slide, and fall into place, violently wrenching my brain.
“You. You’re the one they kept in the private room at St. Julian’s.”
Tears well at the corners of her eyes. She chokes.
“They kept you there, and fed you roots, and put tubes in your stomach.”
She falls into me, sobbing, and I let her. I want to raise my arms, to hold her, but my hands are leaden. She can’t even get any words out for a while. I just let her soak my clothes with tears and snot that chills in the winter air, frosting on the fibers of my sweater. When I finally do raise my hands, it’s to grip her shoulders—she flinches, but I don’t let go—and hold her away from me, and look down into her eyes. She’s way younger than me, barely more than a teenager. Maybe she is a teenager. Like a frozen image of my ex, one that didn’t grow past college-age in the last five years the way I did. Bastards.
“You said you don’t remember your name. Are there other things you don’t remember?”
She pulls up the sleeve of her coat to her palm, wipes her face with it. “N-no, no other things. I remember everything else. I think.”
“Then tell me. Please.” I sit beside her.
She was just a high schooler. Graduating senior, in fact. Then her parents kicked her out and she ended up in shelters, trying to get help from friends, but they were all just kids. No adult truly cared enough—until a woman found her. A gorgeous, tall woman, with delicate white eyelashes and corn-straight platinum hair down to her ass, unearthly peachy-pale skin, and—
“Earrings made of butterfly wings.”
She nods, frantically.
“She took me to a nice hotel, the nicest hotel, and she let me stay there for a whole day. I thought I must be being buttered up for something, but it was so, so nice after everything, I just couldn’t bring myself to leave. And then she sat me down, and—I thought she was going to, I don’t know, be my pimp or something. And I was kind of okay with it by that point. But instead, she asked me if… I’d ever wanted to have kids. And if I was willing to have one, right now, for her and her husband, because they couldn’t do it themselves.”
“Did you see her husband?”
“No, I never did. She only talked about him. Said he was a businessman, and a prince, and a chef—it was so dreamy, and in such detail, I was so certain he must exist.”
“He does. I know him.”
“O-oh. Okay, I guess—I guess I finally know. She… asked me if I believed in magic. And she said, some of that magic was going to happen, but only if I agreed to it. She told me to sign a contract. I’m not stupid, I read it all the way through—basically, I agreed to be kept in their care, they would feed me and protect me, and I would carry the baby, and I wouldn’t terminate the pregnancy. And I would give up my name, and become Addy. It was pretty straightforward.
“The baby—it was so smooth, they used in vitro fertilization, the butterfly lady was there and she held my hand through everything. And she kept giving me vitamins, and weird roots and stuff—I figured she was just a hippie, but she’d sit there and stare at me until I finished, and it started being creepy. And then… they started painting the walls of my hospital room. And keeping me there longer, more than one night at a time. And the place started looking more… more…”
Her face tightens up, like she’s trying to remember. Or like she remembers too well, but doubts herself, or maybe doubts that I’ll believe her. I understand the feeling.
“…I think I was like a frog boiling in a pot. It was so weird, but they’d already treated me so well, and I was already more than halfway through the pregnancy, I just—I kept telling myself, I’ll go look for a job, I’ll have a plan ready for after the birth, I’ll have all this money, I just need to hold out—but then, the lady stopped by one day, and she went out into the hall to talk to someone. And her purse was in the room, so I just reached over, and looked through it quickly—first thing I found was a file. On you. Had your address, your number, your everything. And I found a copy of my contract. I reread the clause, the weird one about giving me a name, and I thought—that’s weird, they couldn’t have given me the name ‘Addy,’ my name is Addy. And then I realized—the second I signed that paper, I’d forgotten my own name. And I hadn’t even known it was disappearing—it was like I just forgot my name ever wasn’t Addy. I even signed the paper as ‘Addy.’
“I freaked out. It was the last straw. I mean, I don’t know how that was the last straw while I was liter
ally living in a room that smelled like rotten food and dead ants, but—I packed everything I could, and I just left. I called you, because I didn’t know who else to call, and… and I’m here.”
I duck my head. “I’m so sorry you got involved in this.”
Her voice cracks. “This baby—it scares me. I don’t know if this is normal with like, hormones and everything, but—when it kicks, it feels weird. And I don’t pray, ever, but I’ve started to…”
I look up at her again, see her barely holding herself together, and I just feel this… this toxic, stomach-churning wave, this bubbling up of… resentment? Rationally, I know that she’s being as strong as she can be, that she’s doing the best she can and it must have taken so much courage to even find me and meet me here—but a voice in my head screams, Why weren’t you stronger? Why didn’t you say no? Why couldn’t you have said no, snapped out of it, run away sooner—for the both of us?
Why did you do this to us?
I have a vision of myself—wrapping my hands around her throat. Of holding a shard, blood hot on my palm as I slice it into her stomach. Of—of—I could end it, I could end this right now, I could end it but what if that’s what he wants me to do? What if that’s what he doesn’t want me to do? I remember what it looked like, my shard cleaving a man’s eyelid in two. I’ve done it before, I can do it again. I’ve held the dying and dead bodies of people I actually give a shit about who died because I wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t fast enough—who is she to me? No one. Just some girl. Just some teenage girl.
Just… some…
Who the fuck am I kidding. All the seething, frothing poison seeps out of me, like pulling a bathtub drain. This is a teenage girl. Just a kid who was abandoned by her parents and swept up into the wake of my decisions. I couldn’t possibly blame her, hurt her, for something he did to me, to us.
I squeeze my temples with one hand. “Okay. Okay okay okay. So, first priority is getting this baby out of you.”
Addy nods, frantically, tears streaming.
“You signed a contract saying you wouldn’t terminate the pregnancy, but that doesn’t mean someone else can’t terminate it for you, by force. We might have to—sedate you or something, but I can call around, there has to be someone I know. It’s going to be okay, okay?”
She’s nodding so hard her hair bounces, muttering pleasepleaseplease.
“I’ll take you back to my place for now.”
I help her up, slinging her backpack over my shoulder so she can close up her coat and hold her belly as she walks. My eyes shift restlessly across the street as I try not to walk too fast for her to keep up. I call Luce; the line rings forever, then goes to voicemail.
“Hey, hey Luce? I know you’re busy, but I need a call back ASAP—do you know anyone in New York who does abortions? And I don’t mean regular ones, though I’m looking into those too—like, late-term abortions. Late, late, late-term. It’s—it’s complicated, but I’m looking for someone like you, a healer—”
“Harry…”
“—and it involves, um, demons, so I’m going to need you to call for me to explain this properly—”
“Harry…”
I look back at Addy.
There’s blood running down her thighs. She’s hiccuping, crying.
“I think it’s happening.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
DADDY'S HOME
She walks forward, unsteadily, into my chest. I hold her, even as my own vision spins.
“It’s happening…” she groans, muffled, into my sweater, and the screaming in my own head echoes her—IT’S HAPPENING. IT’S HAPPENING.
What’s happening?
A woman gasps and drops her bag. Someone else is on the phone.
“Yes—I think she’s pregnant—she’s bleeding—”
I’m muttering almost to myself, tripping over my words, trying to shield her from the gawking eyes, finding nowhere to turn. “Addy, Addy, we have to—we have to get you somewhere, we have to get this thing out of you—”
“I can’t, I can’t, they said I can’t terminate—”
She seizes, violently. I feel her weight shift as one of her feet slips out from under her—I grab at her, futilely, only barely cushioning her fall as her backpack slips off my shoulder onto the ground. Her face is drenched in tears, the corners of her mouth pulling downward in terror.
“Please—please—I don’t want to die—”
“You’re not going to die, Addy, you’re not going to die—”
Sirens. Ambulance sirens. So soon? They can’t really have arrived so quickly—the ambulance screeches to a halt behind me, and two paramedics jump out the back.
“Is this her?”
“Yes,” someone replies before I can respond.
They pull Addy out of my hands—she cries out, clutching at my coat sleeves.
“No—no! No no—”
I’m reaching back, even as a paramedic says, “It’s alright ma’am, your sister can come with us.”
“I’m not her—” Even as my mouth forms the reply, I’m dogging at the paramedics’ heels, doing everything I can to stay with Addy as she grips my sleeve so tightly my wrist aches, as she’s placed onto a gurney, as she’s lifted into the back of the ambulance. I clamber into the cramped space without thinking, without pause.
“Please, don’t leave,” Addy is saying, and I grab her hand.
“I’m not, I swear—”
She looks so much like Adrienne when she cries. The way the blue in her eyes swims, the way her chin dimples—damn it, damn it!
The paramedics are doing all sorts of medical stuff. One of them shines a flashlight in her eyes, checking her vitals, asking her questions. They open her coat, then her flannel, and the front of her striped dress is blooming crimson between her legs.
“She’s miscarrying,” one of the paramedics says.
“N-no,” I respond without thinking. “That’s not what this is.”
Addy tries to say something, but it’s like she can’t focus, her eyes bouncing from corner to corner of the back of the ambulance.
We arrive, lurching, at the hospital—the doors of the ambulance are thrown open and the gurney carried out. I stare up at the building—
St. Julian’s Hospital.
Wrong. Something—everything—is wrong, but I can’t do anything—I try to grab at the gurney as it rolls away, but it’s just out of reach—What would I even do? Where would I even take her? Even as the thoughts race through my head, Addy is being swept away—I have to—to follow them, to try to help.
“This way, this way,” a nurse in a cap and mask says, gesturing as soon as we enter the hospital. The paramedics roll the gurney at top speed—as they round a corner out of sight, just briefly, the nurse turns toward me.
Black eyes like swirling marbles, narrowed as though pushed up by smiling cheeks. Butterfly wings on silver hooks. She winks.
I race to catch up to her.
They’re rolling Addy into an operating room—I try to follow, but someone blocks my way to shove a cap and gown into my hands. They tell me I can’t enter until I have them on. I try to argue but they’re rock-solid, saying they’ll have me thrown out if I endanger the patient—I’m already fumbling with the gown, not even taking off my coat to put it on. Stuffing my hair into the cap, I push my way into the room.
Addy’s eyes are fluttering shut as someone presses an oxygen mask to her face. An anesthesiologist pushes the contents of a syringe into her wrist. Seeing that makes me seize up; I squeeze my wrist in a vise grip, trying to suppress the memories bubbling to the surface—screaming for a nurse, screaming that my IV bag is foaming inside with a yellow, acidic substance that burns in my bloodstream—a nurse is reassuring Addy, holding down her hand with both of her own, keeping her arm level to the bed—nurses pinning me down, walls bleeding and catching fire, ants devouring me, gnawing at my flesh and
spitting me back out mouthful after mouthful—the sound of ripping Velcro, doctors with syringes stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until everywhere I look is more hole than skin—
“Th-this is wrong,” I try to say, grabbing the nearest nurse. “The baby—the baby, it’s killing her—”
“We know,” the nurse says, calmly. “She’s been here before; she’s already on record as needing a C-section.”
“No—no, wait—” Suddenly I’m sure, so sure, too sure. “Don’t cut it out, don’t cut it out of her—”
Why am I here? Why am I here? This is wrong, all wrong—I’m looking for Dolly but she’s not here, I can’t even find the evil in the room to punch, I am useless here, I am only here to witness—I shouldn’t be here, who let me in here?
They put a tube down her throat—for breathing, I know, but I still want to stop them, still want to stop them from touching her—they open up Addy’s dress and cover her blood-streaked legs with a towel, painting the lower bulge of her belly with a brown substance. It’s going too fast, all of it is going too fast for me to tell what’s happening. They cover all of her but her stomach and face with a blue sheet, and the doctor approaches with a scalpel.
They zip it across the bottom of her stomach, once, twice, three times, each time parting a new layer of flesh, skin, uterus, blood—you never really know how thick skin is or how it’s just like any other rubbery shell until you see it cut open—they angle their gloved hand into the incision, make one last cut with scissors, then reach in, holding the baby’s neck wedged between their second and third finger. Once the head is out, the rest of it just kind of… slimes out.
It isn’t crying. It’s wriggling, pushing weakly against the doctor’s arms, eyes glued shut over bulging eyeballs, wrinkled and reddened. “There it is,” a nurse coos; the doctor clamps the umbilical cord twice and cuts it between. The baby is handed to the nurse as the doctor pulls out the placenta.
The baby opens its mouth as if to finally cry. But then it keeps opening, wider and wider, the corners of its lips wrinkling back until it’s more gaping maw than head. And teeth, it has square teeth, like a horse—the nurse is calling, “Doctor? Doctor!”
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