The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  I have insomnia and I’ve begun having regular panic attacks.

  I stay up each night until three or four in the morning, smoking cigarettes and frantically feeling for my pulse, my heart pounding down from another palpitation.

  Skip, skip, beat.

  Skip, skip, beat.

  A fleeting burst of sharp pain in my forehead leaves me breathless and frozen with fear. I sit, rigid like a hunting dog, for over an hour, certain that any movement might bring on an aneurysm.

  My breath comes in shallow gasps. I think my throat is closing.

  Each new symptom signifies my inevitable demise. It is exhausting.

  Just months before, I ended up in an emergency room, certain that I was having a heart attack. Hooked up to monitors and an EKG for hours, the doctors found nothing wrong with me.

  But it’s not that there isn’t anything wrong with me. It’s that what is wrong is invisible.

  Being pregnant suddenly gives me something real to focus on.

  I determine that I’m not more than six weeks along. I go to the Laundromat the day after I take the test, and I pull a chair into a warm patch of sunlight and watch my clothes tumble dry behind the little circular glass window of the dryer.

  I am pregnant.

  I try to make sense of this fact but nothing comes. I have no context for this event. I think about my mother, and the time in high school when I thought I was pregnant. I think about how kind she was then. I wrap my arms tight around my abdomen and watch the clothes in the dryer tumble around and around and around.

  I already know that I am going to have an abortion.

  In fact I will never once consider keeping it. Not one time.

  I CAN’T REMEMBER if it was during my high school pregnancy scare or at another, later, time that my mother told me she had had an abortion.

  She was thirty and living in New York. She’d just ended a brief relationship with some slick Wall Street guy, when she realized that he had left her pregnant. Calls to his home went unanswered and messages left at his office were not returned.

  Finally, with a fury and impatience typical of my mother, she left a message for his secretary, requesting a check for the abortion she was about to have.

  He shelled out immediately, and she went through with it. I don’t remember any other details though. If she’d felt conflicted over the decision or if the experience was a traumatic one, I’ll never know. Either she didn’t tell me or the details left no impression.

  I think about all of this as I watch the laundry tumble around and around.

  Is it wrong that the idea of having an abortion makes me feel closer to my mother?

  I write her a letter on the one-year anniversary of her death.

  Dear Mom,

  I don’t know how to be without you. Please come back.

  Colin doesn’t protest when I tell him my plan. In fact I’ll later wonder if he would have been so passive had it been the other way around. He tells me he’ll fly up and be there for it.

  The next call I place is to my father.

  The same week that I moved back to Vermont my father moved to California. He sighs into the phone, three thousand miles away, when I tell him.

  Just as the only time he will ever walk me down an aisle in a church was at my mother’s funeral, the only time I’ll ever tell my father that I am pregnant is this one.

  Well, kiddo.

  He sighs again.

  I’m standing in the kitchen of the apartment in Vermont, twirling the phone cord around my wrist, as though I am in high school and talking to a boy I have a crush on instead of telling my elderly father about the abortion I am about to have.

  Two days later I drive in my old red Saab to the Planned Parenthood clinic. It is deep, deep cold outside. The sky is a hard blue and slick; black ice coats the road. I smoke cigarettes as I drive, listen to Portishead.

  How can it feel this wrong? From this moment? How can it feel so wrong?

  The clinic is housed in a quaint, wooden A-frame house. The waiting room is really an old living room, with a comfortable couch covered in a knit blanket. A plain-faced receptionist insists that I make myself comfortable. I sit on the edge of the couch, my arms folded tightly across my flat abdomen.

  After a while I am led upstairs, where a kindhearted and very butch old nurse examines me, confirming what I and the nurse-practitioner at school have already determined to be true.

  I am pregnant.

  Afterward we sit in the nurse’s office. Instead of there being a desk between us, we sit in chairs pulled close so we can face each other. Although I’ve never been, this is what I imagine therapy would be like.

  So, what do you want to do?

  I want to have an abortion.

  Have you considered any other options?

  No. I want to have an abortion.

  An alternative might be adoption. Also, there are more resources than you might think if you decide to keep it.

  I want to have an abortion.

  Okay, she says. Her eyes crinkle into a look of sympathy, and I suddenly envy her. I wish I was her. Wise, buoyant, practical. Sitting opposite some girl like me. Not me.

  You’re sure, she says, with one more look into my eyes.

  Yes.

  I don’t know why I’m so firm about the abortion. In some ways it seems like the next logical step in the narrative of my life.

  Mother dies at eighteen.

  Abortion at nineteen.

  It’s as though I don’t have a choice.

  But we always have choices.

  It won’t be until over a decade later, when I am well into the actual world of parenthood, frazzled and overwhelmed with love and impatience for the tiny creature I have created, that I will realize that if I had actually had a baby at age nineteen it might have been the very thing that would have kept me from the years and years of misery and destruction ahead of me.

  It won’t be until I am finally a mother myself, and not until my cheek rests against my child’s soft downy head, that I will realize the bleakness of what I did all those years before.

  I CALL THE NUMBER for the abortion clinic from the kitchen phone in my Vermont apartment.

  A woman answers.

  Clinic, she says plainly.

  Hi, um, I’m calling because I’m pregnant. I want to have an abortion.

  How far along are you?

  Six weeks.

  Not too far. She says this as though she is making a note out loud.

  We settle on a date, and she begins to run through the details of the procedure.

  Someone will need to come with you, she says. You won’t be able to drive yourself home.

  I nod into the receiver. Okay, I say.

  The procedure itself probably won’t last more than fifteen minutes, but you can expect the entire appointment to take one to two hours.

  I nod silently.

  Dress in comfortable clothing.

  Nod.

  Please don’t eat anything the morning of the procedure. It’s fine to have water.

  Okay.

  It isn’t until the end of the call that she asks if I would like to be sedated for the procedure.

  We offer a mild sedation, she says. You’ll be awake but out of it. You won’t feel anything. You may not remember the experience at all.

  I pause before I respond, hanging on that last part: You may not remember the experience at all.

  No, I say, no sedation.

  If this is to be part of my narrative, I want to remember it.

  COLIN FLIES UP, as promised, and I am glad to see him.

  We stand in the cold parking lot of the airport, our arms around each other. Even though it has been less than a month since we’ve seen each other, we are different people.

  We have created something together.

  Colin will move to New York in a matter of months and in the summer I will join him there. Everything about us will deteriorate from that moment on, but now, right now, we are
the only two people in the world who make sense.

  Or three people. Right now we are three people.

  We spend the weekend huddled beneath the quilt in my bedroom, not talking about the baby growing inside me. We drink because it doesn’t matter. Or maybe because it does.

  Monday comes, a cold and overcast day.

  We drive an hour north on Interstate 91, along the river that divides Vermont from New Hampshire. I lean my forehead against the window, the cold, crisp glass feels like the washcloths my mother used to lay over my forehead when I had a fever.

  The clinic is a nondescript building. There is a lone car in the parking lot. No protesters to be seen.

  Inside the waiting room, Colin wanders, his silhouette stark against the wood-paneled walls and library-neat bookshelves, while I fill out a large packet of forms.

  Skip, skip, beat. I try to ignore the palpitations inside my chest.

  I check off the little boxes on each form, indicating my medical history. There is nothing to report. Nothing has ever happened.

  I cannot yet imagine the forms I will fill out for the rest of my gynecological history:

  Number of pregnancies: ___ Number of live births: ___

  When I am finished, I hand over the clipboard to the receptionist, who is as curt in person as she had been on the telephone, and then I sit on the couch beside Colin.

  I am scared, yes.

  But more so, I am lonely.

  I feel distinctly alone sitting in this quiet abortion clinic in Vermont, on a cold Monday in January, one year after my mother has died.

  IN THE PROCEDURE ROOM a nurse tells me to remove my pants and underwear; I can remain clothed from the waist up. I leave my socks on.

  I lie back on an examining table, my feet up in stirrups, knees pressed together, a plastic sheet covering my lower half. I am still wearing a sweater and a shirt, a bra under that. Something about being half-dressed like this is humiliating.

  The nurse looks down at me. This shouldn’t take very long, she says.

  They are all expressionless—the nurse, the doctor, the receptionist—they have to be I realize.

  I nod at her.

  Colin is allowed to be in the room, and he stands next to me looking pale and younger than ever before.

  The nurse runs through the details of the procedure.

  The doctor is going to insert a speculum, and then a long, thin tube that he will use to scrape the walls of your uterus and suction out the contents.

  I nod and think about the word “contents.”

  The cramping afterward may be severe. Are you sure you don’t want a sedative?

  I nod at her again. I’m sure.

  The doctor enters the room, and I crane my neck to get a look at him. He is older, white haired, has a tired look in his eyes.

  Years later, when I write this passage, I’ll feel sorry that I did this to him.

  THE NURSE IS RIGHT. The procedure doesn’t take very long. I grit my teeth and close my eyes as the doctor pushes and tugs about inside me with his instruments.

  I cannot open my eyes. I squeeze them shut as hard as I can, trying to imagine that it is my mother’s hand in mine, not Colin’s.

  And it’s here, right here, on this exam table in an abortion clinic in Vermont, that I realize my mother is never coming back. Although I will have to realize this many times over the course of my life, nothing will ever be as strong a reminder as this.

  Nothing is going to bring her back.

  Some part of me, no matter how magical, believed right up until this very moment that she would make her way back to me before this happened. I realized that I had been ticking off the seconds all morning.

  On the bright, cold drive up the highway.

  In the warm, wood-paneled waiting room.

  Mom, I’m here. Right here. Can you see me?

  There’s still time, Mom. Find me.

  Please find me.

  Don’t let this happen.

  But she is not here. She didn’t make it in time. Or at all.

  The doctor finishes and the cramps come. Thick and hard, they make me curl onto my side, the plastic sheet crinkling over me, perspiration dampening my sweater, tears running down the side of my face and soaking the exam-table paper beneath me.

  I am nineteen and I have just had an abortion.

  Chapter Nine

  2008, I AM THIRTY YEARS OLD.

  IN THE BATHROOM I pee on the little plastic stick and then place it carefully on the edge of the sink. I button my jeans and walk back into the living room, where I sit down on the couch. My husband, Greg, is sitting opposite me.

  Did you take it?

  Yeah.

  Well?

  You have to wait, like, five minutes, I say.

  Oh.

  It is September, early in the evening, and the first cool breeze of fall pushes through the screens of our Chicago apartment. My mother has been dead for almost twelve years.

  You don’t really think you’re pregnant, do you?

  I don’t know. Like I told you, I feel really weird.

  We’d had dinner that night at Greg’s sister’s house in Winnetka, an affluent suburb of Chicago. One of his brothers had been in town, from Cleveland, with his wife and baby, and everyone had convened at Sara’s house.

  The bottle of beer I consumed that night tasted funny. There was something metallic and repugnant about it, and I sipped gingerly, taking time to count and recount how many days past due my period was.

  Just three.

  Greg and I have only been married for two months, and although we have stopped trying to be careful, I am not exactly trying to get pregnant either. I have it in my head that getting pregnant will be no easy feat.

  Thus I am surprised when I walk back into the bathroom and peer through the little indicator window at the plus sign that’s waiting there for me.

  I am pregnant.

  GREG AND I GOT MARRIED in the same church in Cape Cod where my parents were married thirty-three years earlier.

  It was a hot July day and, although I hadn’t expected it to be so, the happiest day of my life. I didn’t feel sad about my parents at all. Not once, in fact.

  I could only think about the man standing before me.

  Gregory Thomas Boose from Ohio. Greg, with his thick brown curls and pale, pale blue eyes. Greg, with his steady hands and husky voice. Greg, who shares a birthday with my father. Greg, who has never been anything but kind and patient and grateful. Greg, who grew up on a farm, once worked as a banker, and is now a writer. Greg, whom I married only one year after meeting him.