Leah wanted to touch Jasmine’s silky black hair, thread its softness through her fingers. She wanted to cry. She let Jasmine pet her stomach a moment longer and then hurried away, rude as a child.
Leah and Greg had met at a party. He worked as a producer for a local public radio station and played violin in a klezmer band. He smelled like honeydew melon and made excellent eye contact. Leah left the party with plans to see Greg a few nights later, and since then, without really discussing it, they’d become a couple. She was thirty; Greg was thirty-two. He was smart and nice and attractive, but if she thought about them spending the rest of their lives together, it made life feel like an endless path before her. And it wasn’t that. It was an astonishing blip in the universe. She could imagine another party, another man, another love she would love more and who would love her more too, a man with whom she might one day—but not now—re-create the double helix in a variation never seen before.
Then why had she been so reckless, so shortsighted, so dumb? It was as if she’d believed the most fundamental biological mechanism of reproduction didn’t apply to her.
For almost two weeks now, she’d managed to avoid Greg. He was out of town visiting family, and then she told him she was really busy at work. He didn’t press her. But finally, late at night, she asked him to come over, and he showed up at her door with a bottle of wine and an innocent smile.
“I missed you,” he said when they hugged and kissed, and it struck her how ignorant men were allowed to be. A man could disappear, or a woman could, and he might never even know there was a child of his in the world.
“Me too,” she said. “Come sit down.”
Greg held up the wine. “Pour you a glass?”
She hesitated. But what did it matter? “Sure.”
Leah waited on the couch, hoping the simple task would take him a long time. As soon as she told anyone, especially Greg, it would break the spell she was spinning. She kept envisioning her body doing what women’s bodies were designed to do, a process similar to the growth of cancer, but with the cells growing exactly as they should, dividing in an orderly fashion from the first fused cell. The blastula had become an embryo, the tail attached to the placenta. At four weeks it had formed arm buds, two optic nerves. It was distinctly curled, structurally similar to the embryonic state of a fish or a lizard. A pinheaded seahorse, with its forty-six human chromosomes monogramming every cell: twenty-three from the male, twenty-three from the female. It was the most common and fascinating thing.
Greg sat on the couch and handed her a glass. She set it on the coffee table.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to have an abortion.” She had meant to say I’m pregnant, but that declaration escaped her, at once too shocking and too tender.
“What?” Greg said. “Shit. We used condoms.”
“Not always.”
“I pulled out.”
“It happened, Greg. It happened.”
He sank his forehead into his hands and then pulled her in for a hug. “I’m sorry.”
She wanted to shrug him off the way she’d wanted to shrug off the life jacket a kayaking instructor had put on her once when she was twelve. She’d known how to swim and she was good at it, but the guy insisted on strapping her in.
They drank their wine down to the last drop and didn’t refill their glasses. They got into Leah’s bed with their clothes on.
“You’re sure about this?” Greg asked in the dark.
“Yes,” she said, the truth and not the truth. There was always another life. She could let the embryo grow. Let the heart start beating, the sex take shape, the organs fully form. Let the lungs expand, expand, expand, until the baby had the capacity to breathe on its own. When it was time she would give birth—the great human struggle of the large head emerging—and there it would be, a new person, over ninety-nine percent genetically the same as everyone else, and yet that less than one percent made all the difference. In this other life, she would be the mother then, with a mother’s instincts to feed and protect and love. She didn’t want to have to decide; she wanted to linger in this embryonic state of suspension. That blue fetus Ms. Hennessy had brought to class almost half her life ago—she could see it still, beautifully and profoundly formed. But that had been a specimen, an unaffiliated, jarred thing. This was happening inside her, and her body made it possible, like a host sustaining a parasite. She would have to make it stop.
She made the appointment for a Friday so she could have the weekend to recover. Greg drove her to the clinic and held her hand in the waiting room. He’d been actively supportive, calling every day to see how she was doing, telling her he hoped it wouldn’t hurt too much. She didn’t expect him to advocate for keeping the baby and it wouldn’t have changed anything if he did. Still, she felt angry—at his evident relief when she’d told him he could just remain in the waiting room; at the fact that he could sit there, reading a biography of one of the lesser presidents, fully clothed, intact.
A nurse called Leah’s name, and Greg gave her hand a final squeeze. The two practitioners who would be doing the job introduced themselves, explained the procedure in gentle tones. Lying down on the table, the thin sheet covering their work, Leah found herself thinking about mice. Years ago, in high school, long before she kept droves of mice in cages and cultivated their cancer, she’d had a mouse as a pet. In her psychology class junior year, she performed simple Skinner-box experiments on this mouse, and when the behavioral psychology unit was over, she brought him home. She used to hold him in her hand, just to see up close his sleek fur, his rooting snout, his prominent ears. To feel his skittering claws surveying her palm. She hadn’t yet seen a dead mouse splayed open, the head lolled back, the paws tied down to the table, all the exposed organs packed inside the tiny mammal. She was so used to it now. She knew it had to be done. Medical research was not for the sentimental. But who else, other than a biologist who worked with mice day in and day out—who observed them, dissected them, examined their cells under microscopes, who identified and analyzed their similarities to humans—could be so grateful that, as a species, mice walked the earth?
The embryonic tissue that was being removed from her uterus would be disposed of as medical waste. State law prohibited research on embryos obtained from abortions. It disgusted her to think of that valuable material simply thrown away. Didn’t it matter to those fools that the polio vaccine had been developed from fetal kidney cells? She’d almost considered driving to another state out of protest. But she knew that would be a futile symbolic gesture that was not going to keep her from leaving the clinic with an emptiness inside. From tracking, for months to come, how that embryo would have grown.
* * *
—
Today Adolfo and Nina marched crayons back and forth across the floor, like they were soldiers in battle. Jasmine manned her post by the stairs, bent over her notebook. Today Jasmine had a question for Leah, fired off with the girl’s winning abruptness. “Does everybody have to die?”
“Yes,” Leah said. “That’s how it is with everybody.” When she was around Jasmine’s age, she’d asked her mother about death, about what happened and why. Her mother had told her not to think about it, which had the opposite effect.
“I might not,” Jasmine said.
“Why do you think so?”
“It’s just a feeling.”
Leah was back in her high school health class, hearing Ms. Hennessey’s voice, so soothing in its matter-of-factness, its lack of surprise: Let yourself feel whatever you feel.
These past weeks, relieved of the pregnancy, she was feeling the chilly arbitrariness of life, and the great luck of it too.
“What would you do if you lived forever?” Leah asked.
“Well, first I’d go everywhere in the world and visit each place for a year,�
�� Jasmine began readily, as if she’d been preparing for someone to ask about her plans for eternal life. “Then I’d be everything you can be. I’d be an artist, a doctor, an actress, a chef, a pilot, and lots of other things. And I’d make inventions and save people and read every book in the library. But only the good ones. I’d have kids, and grandkids, and great-grandkids, and whatever comes after that to infinity. What would you do?”
“I’ve never considered it before,” Leah said. “I guess I’d do the same thing.”
Period, Ellipsis, Full Stop
On Tuesday at around noon, while Elliott was at work, Cora found a jagged circle of bright red on her white underwear, like a botched Japanese flag. Nine weeks into her pregnancy and blood was coming out of her. She sat on the toilet, knees shaking, afraid to look at the toilet paper to see how much more showed up. She’d read those parts in the pregnancy books that discussed bleeding early on, covering the bases from normal spotting, to miscarriage, to the rare but potentially life-threatening wrong turn of ectopic pregnancy. That is, from the possibility that nothing was wrong to the risk that everything was.
Cora pulled off the underwear and ran water over it in the sink, squeezing her legs together as she searched in the cabinet for a panty liner, and then hobbled into the bedroom to get a fresh pair of black underwear. Lying in bed, she thought about what Elliott might be doing right now. Cooking up event plans and budgets at his desk, his shaggy brown hair mussed into a frenzy. Leaning back in his executive chair on the phone, his hazel eyes lively and warm, as he sweet-talked a potential donor who couldn’t even see the expression carefully crafted for her. Five months ago, they’d moved from Philadelphia to this small Midwestern city so that Elliott could take the helm of an up-and-coming nonprofit. It was supposed to be an exciting start to the next chapter of their lives: new jobs, their own house, a baby.
A heavy ache began to bulldoze through Cora’s abdomen. The past few weeks had been full of pangs and proddings. But this was different. More ploughing and constricting than stabby and stretchy. An email popped up on her phone, and she consulted it as if it might answer the question of what was happening to her.
Dear Cora,
I have reviewed all your edits. I would appreciate the chance to debate them with you. Can we meet later this week?
Best wishes,
Kurt
She was trying to start a freelance editing business, with the hope of working on more stimulating books than she’d encountered at her previous job with a textbook company. The kind of books she liked to read—fiction, memoir, something with a strong narrative—books where the language was not governed by the need to deliver information or sell something, but was dedicated to stirring the senses, the soul. In her glummer moments, she thought that reading was the only thing she was good at, and what sort of skill was that for an adult to rely on in this world?
She’d reached out to everyone she knew, looking for potential projects; she’d made a website with a hopeful “Contact Me” link that no one had been clicking on. A few weeks ago, an acquaintance of Elliott’s had introduced her to Kurt. A sixty-something retired entrepreneur, he’d written a draft of a novel and wanted it edited. “It tackles themes of justice and honor, interwoven with a great romance,” he told her, when they met at a coffee shop. She was excited to edit her first novel, doubtful as she was that it would be any good. And indeed the opening chapters Kurt sent confirmed her doubts. The plot was absurd, the pacing completely off, the characters a grab bag of clichés, and the sentences like fence posts: all made the same wooden way. Still, as Cora worked with the text—tinkering with the prose, offering diplomatic critiques and cheerful pleas for more development—she felt the sheen of her own competence that she’d been missing since they’d moved and she hadn’t had regular work. Now here was Kurt’s response to the edits she’d sent: I would appreciate the chance to debate them with you. What was that supposed to mean? Didn’t he know to trust that a professional’s practiced eye could see what you couldn’t? And that if you disagreed with some suggested changes, you just politely ignored them? It wasn’t a matter for debate.
Her finger hovered over Elliott’s number. If she told him she was bleeding, he would be concerned but calm. In that manner that made him so excellent at his job, he would tell her to go see a doctor right away: he wouldn’t be ordering her, just making it clear—soothingly, persuasively—that he understood what needed to be done. She hadn’t even met the doctor yet; her first prenatal appointment was two weeks from now. Apparently, in early pregnancy, you weren’t supposed to need anyone to monitor your progress. You could keep it to yourself, hold it inside: a familial secret, a private triumph, belly not yet giving it away. A woman’s body was supposed to know exactly what to do.
She put the phone down and closed her eyes, the bloody flag of her underwear waving behind her eyelids. The last time it had scared her to see such a thing she was twelve years old. She’d been told what to expect from the booklet they handed out to the girls at school, and from the reports of her faster-developing friend Kari; both sources made menstruation seem like a sophisticated and wondrous event. It hadn’t fully registered somehow that having your period meant you’d bleed actual blood, and a lot of it. Discovering her stained underwear early one morning, she felt that she must have suffered a mysterious injury in the night and her life might now be draining out of her. When Cora’s mother found out what was going on, she didn’t get all teary and bake a cake, like the mother in a book Cora had read. “Well, it’s a drag, but I don’t get PMS too bad, so hopefully you won’t either,” she said. “Just carry a pad with you always, and you’ll be prepared.” She bought Cora a pink zippered pouch to keep in her backpack and said nothing more about the matter.
For the next seventeen years, her period came every month, a dependable nuisance. At times Cora had even found it comforting: a scapegoat to blame her moodiness on, an assurance that her birth control methods were working. And then, when she and her husband of two years wanted to have a baby, she had stopped taking the pill. When her period didn’t show up, the absence of blood was a reminder of its whole purpose. That monthly flow of waste product finally proved useful, stockpiled inside as nourishment for a new life, her body the womanly wonder described in the For Girls Only booklet after all.
Cora pulled her laptop off the nightstand and googled bleeding pregnancy nine weeks. The internet responded with its typical outpouring. The generically informative articles that collectively revealed nothing, mixed in with the queries and pleas and stories that told too much: the play-by-play of anxiety and confusion and prayer and nightmare and everything-turned-out-okay and my-life-is-ruined. The bad grammar and misspellings and weird punctuation and melodrama that was for the most part numbing, but sometimes some anonymous person’s naked account of their experience could get to you, and you might weep, without being sure whether you were weeping for this anonymous person or for yourself. Cora immersed herself in it for almost an hour, toggling between empathy and panic, and then she made herself go to the bathroom, where she found a splotch of blood on the panty liner, a smaller blot than last time. The tainted underwear was still in the sink. She dropped it in the trash and went back to bed.
Unless things got worse, she would wait and call the doctor tomorrow. Would count herself in the camp of first-trimester women for whom bleeding was just a symptom of pregnancy, not of its imminent end. The ones who reported happy news to the online forums: All’s well! Alive and kicking! Just a bit of spotting, nothing more. Not the others, not the sad ones, the desperate ones. She was going to close up her computer and shut those women away inside it. But there was still the matter of Kurt to attend to. She clicked on his email and donned a pleasant, casual-professional tone, while her uterus throbbed.
Dear Kurt,
I’d be happy to meet. How about Friday at 3:00, at the Whole Bean again? There’s a slight chance
I might have to reschedule, but if so, of course I’ll let you know. Looking forward to talking.
Best,
Cora
Then she drove to Walgreens for maxi pads, which she hadn’t worn since she’d learned to use tampons at fifteen, but if you bled during pregnancy, the internet had just taught her, you weren’t supposed to use a tampon. The elderly cashier who rang up Cora’s purchase put the maxi pads in a plastic bag and said, “Here you are, sweetie,” as if she were tendering sympathy.
When Elliott got home, they had a dinner of baked potatoes and steamed vegetables, the only things Cora could bring herself to prepare and eat. He was full of work gossip, a welcome distraction, but also a trigger for her jealousy: she didn’t have colleagues, she didn’t have complicated projects she was trying to get off the ground. Elliott asked how her day was, and she hesitated before telling him about the email from Kurt.
“So you’ll debate him,” Elliott said. “No big deal. Your arguments will be stronger than his, and either he’ll realize that or he won’t. His problem, not yours. It’s his book.”
“But maybe it’s my fault if I don’t communicate things in a way that gets him to understand.”
“That’s not in your control. Think about it. You show a climate change denier solid evidence of the rise in global temperature and warming oceans and shrinking polar ice sheets—and they’re like, then why was it so cold last winter?”
He was right of course. But she was not in the mood for him to be right; she was intent on feeling bad and she wasn’t going to let him stop her.
She went to bed early while Elliott watched TV in the living room. Virtuous TV: a documentary special about wildfires. She hadn’t told him about the blood, the cramping, the internet sisters she’d sought out and then tried to forget. He would be on her about that too, and even though it would be out of care, she didn’t want to have to reveal how her body might be failing both of them. In the bed that felt both luxuriously expansive and lonely without him in it, she pressed her legs together, trying to imagine that if she clenched tight enough, nothing could spill out between them. As if she could say sternly, You’re not going anywhere young lady, young man, whoever you are—and that would be that—the matter decided through her own sheer determination to keep everything inside.
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