by Mary Kubica
I clap my hands for Jack and Paul, but Miranda tells them to go away. To go play.
Every day.
As her baby bump swells more and more, I’m pestered by Miranda to hurry up, to get knocked up, so that her baby and my baby can still go to school together as I’ve promised her they would.
If I wait much longer they’ll be in different grades.
That’s what Miranda has told me.
“September is the cutoff, don’t you know?”
According to Miranda’s timeline, I have until September of next year to have a baby. Twelve months, which leaves only three to get pregnant.
“It’s not that we’re not trying,” I’ve tried to explain, and she counters with a flip of the hand and a slapdash “I know, I know,” and then it’s back to the underwear we go. To help with Aaron’s and my fertility issues, she suggested a pillow beneath my hips to help steer sperm in the right direction. “It’s all about gravity,” she says.
At every visit I watch the size of her own baby bump swell, her maternity shirts no longer able to cover its overwhelming girth. I tell myself that her suggestions are only old wives’ tales, not rooted in truth, but how am I to know if that’s true?
But today when she lounged on my sofa, peering at me with that same expression on her face—mouth parted, eyebrows raised—and asked if I was keeping track of my ovulation, I realized how stupid it was of me, how naive.
This was Aaron’s and my first foray into babymaking. I was sure it was something that just happened, that there was no need to time or plan. In the moment, I told her yes, of course I was keeping track of my dates, because I couldn’t bring myself to say otherwise, to admit to her that it never occurred to me to figure out when I was and when I wasn’t ovulating. Aaron and I both come from large families, and the number of grandchildren our parents have been blessed with is in no way in short supply. It seemed a given that after ample time, after many months of waking up in the morning to Aaron’s soft fingers tracing my bare skin, thumbs hooking through the lacy edges of my underpants, gliding them proficiently over my thighs, sooner or later we’d succeed. We’d make a baby as we intended to do.
But for the first time I’ve come to realize that this is going to take more than time.
After Miranda left I drove to the library and sought out a guidebook on pregnancy and there, in the stacks of books, plotted out my approximate menstrual cycle. I figured out the first date of my last period. I counted backward; I did the math. It wouldn’t be perfect, that I knew—my periods had never been perfect—but it would be close. And close to perfect was better than nothing for me.
And now, knowing that in just two days’ time I will be ovulating fills me with an abundant amount of hope. Aaron and I were doing it wrong all along, missing out on the best times to get pregnant, likely omitting my most fertile days, those negligible hours when conception can occur. On the way home I stopped at the market and picked up a pocket-size calendar and, at home, with a red pen, circled my most fertile days for the next three months, through the end of the year.
This time we’ll get it right.
jessie
I push my way through the turnstile doors and step outside, making my way across the plaza. Beside the Eternal Flame, I pause, overcome with the sudden urge to scale the fence and lie down beside the puny little fire in the fetal position. To fall to my side on the cold concrete, beside the memorial for fallen soldiers. To pull my knees up to my chest in the middle of all those pigeons who huddle around it, trying to keep warm. The land around the flame is thick with birds, the concrete white from their waste. That’s where I want to lie. Because I’m so tired I can no longer stand upright.
People breeze past me. No one bothers to look. A passing shoulder slams into mine. The man never apologizes and I wonder, Can he see me? Am I here?
I head to the bike rack, finding Old Faithful ensnared beneath the pedals and handlebars of a dozen or more poorly placed bikes. I have to tug with all my might to get her out and still I can’t do it. The frustration over my identity boils inside me until I feel myself begin to lose it. All this red tape preventing me from getting what I need, from proving who I am. I’m starting to question it myself. Am I still me?
The debilitating effects of insomnia return to me then, suddenly and without warning. General aches and pains plague every muscle in my body because I can’t sleep. Because I haven’t been sleeping. My feet hurt. My legs threaten to give. I shift my weight from one leg to the next, needing to sit. It’s all I can think about for the next few seconds.
Sitting down.
Pins and needles stab my legs. I wrench on the bike, yanking as hard as I can, but still she doesn’t budge. “Need a hand?” I hear, and though clearly I need a hand, there’s a part of me feeling so suddenly indignant that I turn with every intent of telling the person that I’ve got it. Words clipped. Expression flat.
But when I turn, I see a pair of blue eyes staring back at me. Royal blue eyes like the big round gum balls that drop down the chute of a gum-ball machine. And my words get lost inside my throat somewhere as I rub at my bleary eyes to be sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing. Because I know these eyes. Because I’ve seen these eyes before.
“It’s you,” I say, the surprise in my voice clear-cut.
“It’s me,” he says. And then he reaches over and hoists Old Faithful inches above the other bikes, those that have held her prisoner all this time. It’s effortless to him, like nothing.
He looks different than the last time I saw him. Because the last time I saw him he was folded over the cafeteria table, drinking coffee in a sweatshirt and jeans. Now he’s dressed to the nines in black slacks, a dress shirt and tie, and I know what it means. It means that his brother has died. His brother, who was hurt in a motorcycle accident after a car cut him off and he went flying off the bike, soaring headfirst through the air and into a utility pole without a helmet to protect his head.
He held vigil beside his brother’s hospital bed while I held vigil beside Mom’s. And now, six days later, his eyes still look tired and sad. When he smiles, it’s strained and unconvincing. He’s gotten a haircut. The dark, messy hair has been given a trim and though it’s not prim or tidy—not by a long shot—it looks clean. Combed back. Much different than the hair I saw those days and nights in the hospital cafeteria, his head stuffed under the hood of a red sweatshirt. We only spoke the one night, him fussing about the coffee, telling me how he’d rather be anywhere but there. But still, there’s the innate sense that I know him. That we shared something intimate. Something much more personal than coffee. That we’re bound by a similar sense of loss, united by grief. Both collateral damage in his brother’s and my mother’s demise.
He sets Old Faithful down on the ground and passes the handlebar to me. I take her in my hand, seeing the way his nails are bitten to the quick, the skin torn along the edges. A row of rubber bands rests on his wrist, the last one tucked halfway beneath the cuff of the dress shirt. A single word is written on the back of the hand with blue ink. I can’t read what it is.
He runs his hands through his hair and only then do I think what I must look like.
It can’t be good.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, as if I have any more right being here than him.
He speaks in incomplete sentences, and still I get the gist. “The wake,” he says. “St. Peter’s. I needed some air.”
He points in the direction of some church just a couple of blocks from here, one that’s too far to see from where we stand. Though still I look, seeing that the sun has slipped from the sky and is hidden now behind a cloud. While I was inside the building, the clouds rolled into the city, one by one. They changed the morning’s blue sky to one that is plush and white, filling the sky like cotton balls, making the day ambiguous and gray.
I don’t ask when or how his brother died and he
doesn’t ask about Mom. He doesn’t need to because he knows. He can see it in my eyes that she has died. Neither of us offer our condolences.
He rams his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “You never told me your name,” he says. If I was the kind of girl that felt comfortable in situations like these, I’d say something snarky like Well, you never asked.
But I don’t because it’s not that type of conversation, and I’m not that girl.
“Jessie,” I say, sticking my hand out by means of introduction. His handshake is firm, his hand warm as he presses it to mine.
“Liam,” he says, eyes straying, and I take it as my cue to leave. Because there isn’t anything more to say. The one and only conversation we had in the hospital, words were sparse, but unlike in the hospital we’re no longer killing time, just waiting for people to die. That night, before the conversation drifted to quiet and we sat in silence for over an hour, sipping our coffees, we talked about private things, nonpublic things, things we weren’t apt to tell the rest of the world. He told me about his brother beating him up when they were kids. About how he would lock him out of the house in the rain and shove his head in the toilet, giving him a swirly when their folks weren’t home. Such a bastard, he said, though I got the sense that that was then and this was now. That over the years, things changed. But he didn’t say when or how.
I told him about Mom’s hair and fingernails, both of which she lost thanks to chemotherapy. Her eyelashes too. I told him about the clumps of hair that fell out, and how I watched on in horror as Mom held fistfuls of it in her hands. How there were whole clods of it on her pillowcase when she awoke in the morning, masses of it filling the shower drain. I said that Mom never cried, that only I cried. It grew back, after the cancer was in remission for the first time, soft fuzz that grew a little thicker than it was before chemotherapy. A little more brown. It never reached her shoulders before the cancer returned.
“You should get back to the wake,” I tell him now as we stand there in the middle of Daley Plaza. But he only shrugs his shoulders and tells me that the wake is through. That everyone split.
“The funeral’s tomorrow,” he says as I wrap my fingers around Old Faithful’s handlebars. I don’t know what to say to that. There isn’t anything to say to that.
Turns out, I don’t need to say anything. “You never said what you’re doing here,” he says then, but as I’m about to explain I realize that there’s no easy answer for it, because the reason I’m standing outside Daley Center is far more convoluted than his. And so instead of answering, I sigh and say, “Long story,” thinking that he’ll just say okay and walk away because chances are good he didn’t want to know in the first place. He was probably only being polite because I asked what he was doing here, and so he thought he should too, that he should reciprocate out of courtesy.
But as he shifts in place and tells me, “I have time,” I realize that he wants me to stay.
There’s a sadness in his eyes, the likeness to mine uncanny.
We walk. Out of the plaza, down Washington and toward Clark Street, me towing Old Faithful by the handlebar. We walk in the street because it’s illegal to ride a bike on the sidewalk in the city. I don’t know what time it is, but what I can say is that the haste of rush hour is past, the clog of morning traffic like hair in a shower drain. Impossible to get through. It’s gone, as if some plumber stopped by and dropped a gallon of Drano on the street, ameliorating the clog. People move slowly now. They take their time. Without the blockage we easily slip through, weaving in and out of pedestrians and cars.
“I stopped by vital records,” I say. “I needed to get my birth certificate. Except that didn’t go as planned,” I explain as we turn a right on Clark, which is a one-way street around here. All the cars come directly at us. They miss us by a hair’s breadth at times because there are no bike lanes. Not that it matters because half of the time when there are, cars and trucks illegally park and I have to veer around them and into traffic. The number of bike-related deaths in the city is staggering; I just hope that one day one of them isn’t me.
Liam asks why getting my birth certificate didn’t go as planned. He’s a good ten inches taller than me, broad in the shoulders but narrow around the hips. At just over five feet, I’ve always been on the short side. My whole life, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been short. Kids in school used to make fun of me. They’d call me names like shrimp, peanut. Squirt.
He towers over me, his body slim but in the tailored clothes, he doesn’t look too thin. I remember him in the hospital—oversize sweatshirt and jeans, getting swallowed up by fabric. Then he looked thin.
I start at the beginning and tell Liam the whole story. Otherwise it won’t make sense. And even then it doesn’t make much sense because I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it myself. I tell him about applying to college, the phone call from the financial aid office. The woman’s cheery voice on the other end of the line, laughing, telling me I’m dead. I tell him about the wasted time spent trying to find my social security card, the worthless trip to the Social Security Office. The one that led me here, to the Daley Center in search of my birth certificate, though that too was a waste.
“I don’t have a birth certificate,” I close with. “At least not one in the state of Illinois. And without a birth certificate or a social security number, there’s no way to prove who I am or that I even exist. But what freaks me out even more,” I admit, “is this implication that—”
But before I can get the words out, birds swarm around me, moving in from all directions. Pigeons with beady eyes and little bobbing heads, pecking at something on the street. They fight over it, their squawks loud and angry. I try to sidestep them, but their movements are arbitrary, aimless; there’s no predicting where they’ll go. I step on the tail feathers of one by chance and it scurries, wings slapping together to get away from me.
As I go to take another step, I see what the skirmish is all about. It’s another pigeon, dead, lying on the street where my foot should go. The other birds move in on it, pecking at it, trying to eat it, and just like that, there’s nowhere for me to put my foot. It throws off my stride, makes me lose balance. The dead pigeon lies on its back, spread-eagle-like. Its wings are fanned on either side of its body, white belly exposed, its neck turned too far in one direction, broken I think. I see only one beady eye, the other somehow missing. Its beak is tucked into the crook of a neck, and on the street beside it are flecks of blood.
I nearly step on the carcass as my body lurches forward, stumbling, and I’m sure I’ll fall. My heartbeat kicks up a notch or two, hands sweaty, and like that I’m at the mercy of the bird and the street.
I let go of Old Faithful’s handlebars by accident. I watch as she topples onto the street, certain I’m about to go with her. People turn to see what the racket is, the clang of the bike on the street, the sound of my scream. My hands reach for something to latch on to, coming up empty until Liam grabs me by the wrist, steadying me.
“Jessie?” he asks, and I have to fight for a minute to catch my breath. I’m breathing hard, seeing only pigeons nipping the bloody flesh of a dead bird. And I’m thinking about that bird, wondering what happened to kill the bird. How did it die? If it was killed by a car or a bike, or a run-in with a building window maybe. Maybe it flew headfirst into the Thompson Center before sliding down, down, down to the ground.
“Jessie?” Liam asks again because I still haven’t replied. His eyes watch me, uneasy, as he makes sure I’m steady on my feet before leaning down to reclaim Old Faithful from the street.
“Are you okay?” he asks, and, “What happened?” and I shake my head and say, “The damn bird. Those pigeons.”
“What bird?” he asks. “What pigeons?”
I turn to point them out to him. But when I look back on to the street behind me, there’s no bird. No pigeons. The only thing there is a squandered ho
t dog that lies on the asphalt. Half-eaten, gravel stuck to what remains of it. Chunky green relish spilling from the bun, red ketchup splattered here and there like blood.
There’s no dead bird.
There was never a dead bird.
The world loses balance all of a sudden, the street beneath my feet unpredictable and insecure. I think of sinkholes, when the earth suddenly decides to give, roadways collapsing like Play-Doh, sucking people in and swallowing them whole.
I shake my head. “Just tripped over my own feet,” I say, but I can see in Liam’s eyes: he doesn’t believe me.
We move on.
Liam waits for me to finish whatever it is I was saying before I saw the bird, but now my train of thought is gone. I can think only of the bird, the pigeons, the flecks of blood. And so he reminds me. And then I remember.
What freaks me out the most, I tell him, is the implication that I’m already dead.
He asks about the death database. What it is and what it’s called, and so I tell him what the woman from the financial aid office told me.
“The Death Master File,” I say, which in and of itself sounds like something the grim reaper must carry along with him, a listing of all the souls he’s sent to collect. Liam looks it up on his smartphone, and soon finds out that access to the file is restricted. That not just anybody can look at it. He tells me what I already know. That it’s a listing of millions of people who have died, them and their social security numbers. It’s used as a means to prevent fraud and identity theft. To stop living people from opening credit cards and getting mortgages in the name of someone who’s already dead.