by Len Vlahos
No. There was something else besides Johnny. Something bigger. Much bigger.
I smiled as I picked up the pencil again. It felt good to write. Felt good to get so much of it out of me. After a while, the writing wasn’t even about Scranton. The exercise became its own reward.
CHEYENNE BELLE
A late-term miscarriage was what the doctor called it. Anything before twenty weeks—and we figured out that I was sixteen weeks—is a miscarriage. Anything after is a stillbirth. That’s what they told us.
I just lay there and cried. The doctor left the room so my sisters and I could have a few minutes. I don’t know how long I cried, but it was a long time.
I had only just decided to keep the baby, but maybe I’d been leaning that way all along. I mean, I’m definitely pro-choice and all—who am I or anyone else to tell girls what to think or what to do with their bodies—but given who I am and how I was raised, I don’t know if I could’ve made any other decision. It was my choice to keep the baby. I mean, think about the words to “Lullaby.” Of course I was going to keep the baby.
By that point, though, none of that stuff mattered.
The doctor’s words—There’s no heartbeat—were stuck in my brain like a skipping record. What the hell was I supposed to do with that?
Once I calmed myself down enough, I had only one thought. I squeezed Theresa’s hand and said, “Get it out of me.” She nodded and went to get the doctor.
An hour later, after more paperwork, after Agnes went home to get her money and had come back, the doctor was administering a local anesthetic.
The procedure for getting a dead baby out of you is pretty much the same as for an abortion. Either way, it’s fucking awful. It’s called a D & C. I didn’t want to know anything about it, but Agnes kept asking questions.
“What does that stand for?”
“Dilation and curettage.”
“What do you actually do?”
“We’ll dilate Cheyenne’s cervix and then remove the entire contents of her uterus.”
“How?”
The doctor was explaining all this while she was doing other things to prep for the procedure. She reminded me of Richie’s dad, Mr. Mac, who never seemed to have a moment when he wasn’t doing something.
“We use something called a cannula tube. It creates a gentle suction that allows us to draw out any tissue.”
I couldn’t help but notice that she never referred to what was inside me as a baby.
“Wait,” Theresa said. “You mean you, like, use a vacuum cleaner to suck the baby out of her? Gross!” Agnes looked at Theresa like she was going to kill her.
“Okay, girls, time for you to go to the waiting room,” the doctor said abruptly. “This will take about thirty minutes, and the anesthesia is going to make Cheyenne feel a bit woozy. She’ll need your help getting home.”
“Of course, Doctor,” Agnes said. Theresa rolled her eyes at Agnes’s perfect way of speaking, and then the doctor and I were alone.
“Does the father know?” she asked me as she started the process of dilation.
“What? Oh, no. I can’t tell him.”
Dr. McCartney looked at me. “Did he hurt you?”
The sedative was starting to kick in, and it took me a minute to understand what she was getting at.
“Hurt me?”
“Is that why you can’t tell him?”
“No, no, it’s not like that at all. He was in an accident a couple of months ago and lost his leg. He’s dealing with his own shit. Sorry.” I corrected myself, “Stuff.”
The doctor smiled at me and went back to her work.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Shoot,” she said.
“Johnny, the dad, stood up without his prosthetic leg, lost his balance, and fell on top of me yesterday. We landed on a bed. It wasn’t too hard or anything, but could that have made this happen?” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice.
“No, Cheyenne,” she answered. “I don’t think so. It would have to have been a pretty big trauma to your body, and what you’re describing doesn’t really fit the bill.”
“Then why did this happen?” I started crying again.
“Look.” She held my hand. “There could be lots of medical reasons, some of them hereditary—”
I chuckled under my breath, but loud enough to cut the doctor off. “My mom has seven children, all girls,” I explained, and then remembered that wasn’t the whole story. “But my sister Theresa lost a baby last year. It was a stillbirth, at home, in bed.”
“That could be an indicator of the hereditary nature of what’s happening here. Is your sister okay?”
“Actually, she’s usually a pretty big bitch.” Dr. McCartney smiled but didn’t play along with the lame joke I was trying to make. Given how nice Theresa was being, I knew it was a pretty crappy thing to say. “Maybe that’s harsh,” I added, trying to redeem myself. “I mean, she’s here now. That’s more than I’ve ever done for her.” I paused before adding, “Maybe I’m the bitch.” Dr. McCartney chuckled with me at first, but noticed almost right away that my laughter was morphing into sobs. I was totally losing it.
Squeezing my hand one more time and letting it go, the doctor went back to work while she talked to me. “There are genetic markers that we’re only just now beginning to understand. But like so much of what can go wrong with the human body, sometimes there is no rhyme or reason. It is what it is. That doesn’t make it better or easier, but it also doesn’t preclude you from having children someday in the future—far in the future. Speaking of which, you should probably make an appointment to come back and talk to me about birth control.”
I nodded and was quiet.
Other than little words of explanation (“You might feel a little pinch”) or encouragement (“You’re doing great, Cheyenne”), Dr. McCartney didn’t talk again until it was finished.
“Your body’s been through a lot, and I want you to get rest. I’m going to give you a prescription for pain medicine and one for antibiotics. Take the pain meds as you need them, but be sure to finish the entire flight of antibiotics.” She took my hand, squeezed it, and looked me square in the eye. “You’re going to be fine, you understand? You have a good family. Let them take care of you.
“Stay here for a few minutes,” she said as she stood up. “I’ll send your sisters in.”
She left the room. I muttered, “Thank you,” to an afterimage of Dr. McCartney and started crying again.
HARBINGER JONES
I told my parents I wasn’t feeling well and ate dinner in my room. I wanted to keep working on the essay, and I didn’t want them to know what I was doing. I was pretty sure they would both completely freak out, especially my dad, and that wasn’t what I needed just then. I wasn’t even sure that I actually wanted to go to college. I mean, the idea was more and more appealing, but I wanted to keep my options open. For now this would stay my secret.
I wrote until my vision was blurred and my hand was so cramped I could barely hold the pencil. It was 3:00 a.m. when I stopped, and dozens of notebook pages were filled, front and back. I got all the way to the moment in the story of my life when Johnny suggested we start a band.
The more I thought about that moment, about me and him in his house, listening to records and talking about music, the more I realized that was the moment my life really began. So I used my cramped hand to scratch, And that was how it all began, onto the page before finally stopping for the night.
Take that, admissions professional, I thought. I’m already so far over your word count as to be ridiculous, and now I’m telling you that I haven’t even started yet.
For some reason, I thought that was really funny, and for the very first time in my life that I could remember, I fell asleep giggling.
CHEYENNE BELLE
I took one of the pain meds, took my antibiotics, and slept that night at home like I’d never slept before. When I woke up the next day, a Sunday, my parents a
nd most of my sisters had gone to church. Only Theresa and I were in the house.
She was in bed when I rolled over and opened my eyes.
“Am I still cool with Mom and Dad?”
Theresa was lying there with her Walkman on, listening to God-knows-what-awful pop music—Debbie Gibson or Madonna or something. Her favorite song, which she played all the time, was “All You Zombies” by the Hooters. It has to be the dumbest song ever recorded. Did you know that that band put it out as a single not once, but twice, and that they included it on two different albums? Way to beat a dead horse, guys.
Anyway, Theresa didn’t hear me, so I took off my sock to throw at her, you know, to get her attention. Only when I bent over, my midsection really hurt.
I knew I’d moaned, but I didn’t realize how loud until Theresa sat up and dropped her headphones to her neck.
“Are you all right?”
“I think so,” I said, out of breath. “Is it supposed to hurt this much?”
“Yes,” she answered, slid the headphones up, and lay back down. I guess things were back to normal between us.
I still had a sock in my hand, so I threw it at her anyway.
“What the fuck, Cheyenne?” She was back up, and the headphones were back down.
“I don’t know, maybe a little support?” It was the wrong thing to say.
“A little support? Are you kidding?”
“Look, I—”
“No, you look. Aggie and I talked last night after you passed out. This cost us a lot of money.” I hated that people called my sister Aggie. I knew she didn’t like it, because when people outside the family used that nickname, she always set them straight. But it was too late with Theresa; that ship sailed when Agnes—which is such a pretty name—was three.
“I’m gonna pay you back.” I don’t know what I’d expected when I woke up, but it wasn’t getting yelled at.
“With what, the money for your little band of weirdos and cripples?” When she wanted to, Theresa could be the biggest bitch on the planet. I was too weak to fight back, so I laid my head down and closed my eyes. The connection I’d had with my sisters the day before felt so real and so nice, but it was like a temporary tattoo that had worn off overnight.
“I’ll get a job,” I said without any emotion. Theresa snorted.
I lay there for another minute before the sock I’d thrown at Theresa came back and hit me in the face. I sat up and looked at her. Something in her face had softened a little.
“Look, if there’s anyone in the world who knows how you feel, it’s me, and I’m sorry if I sound like a bitch.” I didn’t answer. I think maybe she was waiting for me to tell her that it was okay, that she wasn’t a bitch, but that wasn’t going to happen, so I just kept my mouth shut until she finished. “But you’ll get over this. You’re not the first girl to lose a baby, and you won’t be the last.”
I guess that was Theresa’s way of telling me everything was going to be okay. Pretty lame, right? Anyway, I just nodded and put my head back down.
I don’t know if my sister heard or saw me crying—I tried to be quiet, and I figured that she had put the headphones back on—but I refused to open my eyes to find out. I fell back asleep.
When I finally got up, after my family got back from church, my mother scolded me for sleeping so late. “When the Lord made Sunday a day of rest, he didn’t make it for you.” I was actually happy to hear it. It meant she didn’t know anything about what had happened the day before.
I told her that I was sick and was going back to bed. She just snorted at me. I called Johnny and told him the same thing.
“I’m sorry about the other day,” he said. His voice sounded far away and sad, like that donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh.
I was confused and paranoid for a minute, and thought maybe he’d found out about Planned Parenthood and was apologizing for not being there.
“Yeah, you know, in my bedroom.”
Then it hit me. He was talking about falling on top of me on his bed. Did that happen only Friday? I was disoriented and freaked out. I told him not to worry about it, but that I really wasn’t feeling well and that I needed to sleep.
“Okay, Pick,” he said. “Let me know if I can bring you anything.”
“Thanks,” I answered.
“I love you.” We’d been saying that to each other since the summer, and it had become our standard way of saying good-bye. When you say something over and over, it starts to lose its meaning. It doesn’t carry any more weight than adios, ciao, or see you later. It becomes a noise, a kind of emotional grunt, you know?
But this time it had all the meaning in the world, and I choked up. I pretended to cough, said, “I love you,” back, and hung up the phone, burying my face in my pillow when I did.
I knew then that I could never tell Johnny that I’d carried and lost his baby, our baby. He just wouldn’t understand why I’d kept it from him in the first place. If I could go back in time and do one thing over, it would be that phone call. I would just tell Johnny everything.
“Smooth,” Theresa said from the doorway. That was the thing about my house. You never could get any privacy.
I gave her the finger and laid my head gently down on the pillow.
RICHIE MCGILL
Yeah, the band went on a minibreak when Chey “got the flu.” I knew she was pregnant, and I was worried something was going on. I kind of wanted to call and ask how she was doing, but that’s not how we rolled.
I wound up spending a lot of that week just hanging around at home after school. The weather got way colder, and I wasn’t really in the mood to take my board out, so I watched TV, drank iced tea and ate party pretzels, and practiced drumming on my pads.
And then Johnny called.
Johnny never called me. None of the guys in the band ever really called me. It’s something about being a drummer. Guitar players and singers and bass players all think we’re some sort of spare part: like we’re spark plugs, easy to replace. That’s why there are so many drummer jokes.
What happened when the bass player locked his keys in the car? It took him half an hour to get the drummer out. There’s, like, a million of them, and they all pretty much make drummers out to be idiots. It doesn’t really bug me, though. I mean, I notice, but I figure it’s someone else’s hang-up, not mine.
So anyways, Johnny calls and says that since the band isn’t jamming, he wants to hang out, and can I come pick him up?
“Sure,” I say.
“Great,” he says, sounding really relieved or something. “Bring your skateboard.”
My board? I think to myself, but I don’t question it. Johnny’d seemed a bit, I don’t know, out of tune, and I figured I should try to help him.
So fifteen minutes later I’m at his house, his mother showing me to his bedroom. I’d been before, but not that often, so I could feel his mom kind of checking me out. I don’t mean checking me out ’cause she wanted to see my hot ass, I mean sizing me up. We all knew she hated Harry and Cheyenne—even Johnny said that was true—but she didn’t really know me. I was pretty sure she didn’t like me any better, because, you know, I was in the band.
When I walked into Johnny’s room, he was downing a pill of some sort with a glass of water.
“What’s that, for your leg?”
He looked at me for a long moment, embarrassed, I think, that I’d caught him taking meds.
“Antidepressant,” he said, and then added, “Don’t tell Chey or Harry, okay? It’s not a big deal, and I know both of them would make it a big deal.”
He was right about that; they would. So I agreed.
“How long you supposed to take them for?”
“I don’t know. Until I’m not depressed, I guess.”
“Why are you depressed?” He looked at me, looked at his leg, and held out his arms as if to say, “Why the fuck do you think I’m depressed, numb nuts?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I get it. But, John, when you think about i
t, things could be a lot worse.”
He just rolled his eyes and asked, “Did you bring your board?”
“Yeah, it’s in the car.”
“Good.”
“Why?”
“I want you to teach me to ride.”
“Say what?”
“Look, I need to do something to push myself harder. I see how much you love it, and figure it’s a good way to test the boundaries of my leg.”
“I don’t know, John. . . .”
“C’mon, I’ll be fine. It’ll be fun.”
“It’s a little cold for skateboarding.” I thought this was a bad idea, and I was trying to make any excuse to get out of it.
“We have coats. Let’s go.”
That was Johnny at his best. The case was closed, and we were going. He had this weird voodoo shit that made you go along. It’s how I joined the band in the first place.
I was in the seventh grade and had just gotten this used, piece-of-crap, three-piece drum set for my birthday. I couldn’t play for shit. Anyway, Johnny, who was a year older than me, had somehow heard about it. He found me at my locker.
I knew who Johnny was. Everyone in our school did. He was one of those dudes who seemed to be at the center of things.
“You’re Richie,” he said to me. “You play drums.”
“Yeah,” I answered, not sure what to make of the fact that Johnny McKenna had singled me out.
“I’m starting a band, and we need a drummer. You’re it. I’ll let you know when and where our first practice is.”
That was it. No invitation to join, just an order to follow. And like everyone else who dealt with Johnny, I just went along. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Anyways, back to the day he called me. A few minutes later, we were on the playground at our old elementary school and Johnny was using his good leg to push my skateboard while he stood on it with his fake leg. But here’s the thing about skateboarding that most people don’t realize: it’s as much about your feet and ankles as it is about your legs. You make a million little adjustments every second just to stay on the board. I’m not saying someone with a fake leg can’t learn to skateboard, but it would take time and maybe something better than the uneven elementary school blacktop on a cold November day.