Counting Backwards

17

Jessa

April 2022

Two days had passed since I discovered I was pregnant, and I still hadn’t told Vance. It should have brought us closer, this happy news, but if anything, I was retreating from him even more.

Now I was at Dr. LaRusso’s office, lying on the exam table, staring up at the ceiling, a paper sheet draped over my legs. I hoped with all my heart that the doctor would say the pregnancy was real. I had taken two more tests to confirm the positive result. But still. I’d read all about chemical pregnancies, faulty test batches, early miscarriages. I was afraid to get too excited.

“Go ahead and sit up,”

the doctor said, rearranging the sheet so I was more fully covered. He removed his latex gloves and rolled a few feet back from me on his little round chair. “So I am seeing early signs of a pregnancy.”

He smiled and I felt myself grinning back. “We’ll confirm everything with the bloods and also make sure your hormone levels are where they should be.”

At the words hormone levels, I felt another burst of panic.

“What if they’re not right? My hormones?” I asked.

“Then we supplement what your body is already doing with synthetic hormones to support the pregnancy. I know you’re concerned, Jessa, but I see no signs indicating you’re at any particular risk for miscarriage.”

“Okay.”

I nodded, trying to absorb the doctor’s words, trying to believe them. “Then what should I do now?”

“Other than taking the prenatal vitamins and cutting out certain foods, there’s not much else I would recommend yet. Mostly, just try to avoid undue stress, alcohol, lifting anything particularly heavy. No scuba diving,”

he added with a chuckle. “That’s about it.”

I let out a heavy breath, unsure whether it was a sigh of relief or concern.

“We’ll make an appointment for about eight weeks from now for the first ultrasound.”

Dr. LaRusso stood and closed the folder that held my information. “You’ll want to bring Vance so he can hear the heartbeat.”

It all seemed like magic, sorcery, the idea that there could soon be a second heart beating inside my body. I was already wondering whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. I thought of my parents. Would it be a baby boy with a cleft in his chin, just like my dad’s? Or would it be a girl, maybe with my mother’s singing voice? My mom would have made the best grandma, the kind with a signature cookie recipe and a never-ending supply of exuberant hugs. I wished all over again that they were still alive so I could share the joy of this moment with them. If only I wanted to share it with Vance too.

As Dr. LaRusso prepared to leave the room, I realized I still had so many questions.

“When you say avoid stress,”

I asked, “could you elaborate on that?”

He waved a hand in the air dismissively.

“There’s no conclusive data really linking stress to miscarriage, but many of us in the medical community believe stress can impact pregnancy, or a mother’s health overall. That said, a fetus is generally hardier than a lot of people give it credit for. I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s the nature of being pregnant, I think. Worrying about worrying,”

he joked, patting my elbow.

After the doctor excused himself, I used the paper sheet that had been covering me to wipe the gel from myself. I got back into my yoga pants and shoved both the sheet and paper gown into the aluminum trash bin beside the exam table. Eight weeks seemed like an awfully long time to wait to confirm a baby was still growing inside me. And the doctor wanted me to avoid stress? Laughable. The only time I could imagine being calm about the pregnancy would be in about nine months, when—if!—I had an actual living, breathing baby in my arms.

As I slipped my feet back into my sneakers, I tried to push away my panic and focus on other things. I had meetings lined up over the next few days with four different women whom Fern had sent my way, two still at Hydeford and two who’d been released. I had to finish prepping for those appointments, and I also wanted to start drafting a complaint, even though there was still much information to collect. If I wanted to help save the current and future women at Hydeford, as well as my position at Dillney, I really had no time to waste.

I made my way out of the doctor’s office with an unfamiliar feeling in my chest, as if an electrical current were pulsating inside me. It was part excitement, part dread, and so much more that I couldn’t put a name to. I knew I had to share the news with Vance. I was also entirely confident that he would be thrilled—which was why I had to keep asking myself why I was so reluctant to tell him.

* * *

Hours later, I sat cross-legged on our living room carpet with my back against the sofa and my computer open in my lap. I was surrounded by the different file folders I’d created for each distinct legal issue in the immigration case, as well as folders of information pertaining to each different witness. Even though my method was old-school, I always preferred having hard copies of important documents on hand as I did my work. This was proving especially useful as I typed out page after page of the draft complaint.

At the sound of keys in the door, I stiffened. I was in the zone with my work and had a million tasks I still wanted to finish, so it really wasn’t the best time for a pregnancy announcement. Vance and I had spent the last two days passing like ships in the night, barely interacting since our last argument. In all likelihood, he was about to storm into the apartment and march right past me again, just to make some sort of point about my unreasonable behavior. Allegedly unreasonable.

Even so, as he pushed the door open, I pasted a smile onto my face.

“Still at it, huh?”

he asked, without any of the obvious rancor I’d expected. He dropped his messenger bag near the door and came to sit beside me on the floor, mimicking my cross-legged position as he sat against the sofa next to me. I figured he’d finally come to terms with the fact that I was moving forward with the class action, whether he was on board or not.

“Yup.”

I leaned over on one hip and kissed him lightly on the cheek, just as I normally would to reconnect after a long day apart. “Just working on the complaint.”

“Wow,”

he said, glancing at the computer screen. “I didn’t realize you had enough information to be at the drafting stage already.”

“I don’t, really,”

I confessed. I made a few clicks to save the document and then shut my laptop. “But I wanted to start on it anyway to help clarify my thoughts. I thought writing it down would highlight which areas need more attention and which information I should still be trying to collect. It’s helping me to see the case from more of a legal perspective and not just through the lens of my moral outrage. Does that make sense?”

I looked at him for confirmation that he was following along.

He nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

Then he rocked to the side so his knee bumped mine in a gesture of solidarity. “What else are you thinking about it?”

“I mean, it’s crazy, the case law and history that I’m finding about similar situations. Ever heard of the ‘Mississippi appendectomy’?”

Vance shook his head.

“Yeah, I hadn’t either. Apparently it was the name given to unnecessary hysterectomies at teaching hospitals in the South in the 1970s. Women were misled to believe they were having procedures like appendectomies and then were sterilized instead. The victims were mostly poor women of color, many of whom were never told what had really been done to them. It was training for the med students. A practice so prevalent it got a name, Vance.”

He shook his head slightly, as if stunned by the thought.

“And then there’s California,”

I continued. “They banned coerced sterilization as a form of birth control in prisons in 2014 after detained women came forward about what was happening to them. In 2014!”

I still couldn’t believe it myself. “It’s so recent, like . . . I can still smell the flagrancy of it. And that doesn’t even take into account the twenty thousand people in the state who were sterilized between 1920 and 1979 because they were deemed unfit to reproduce. It’s everywhere. Virginia sterilized at least eight thousand people during that time period for the same reasons. North Carolina sterilized over seven thousand. The list goes on and on. Oh, and guess what percentage of those victims were women of color?”

“It’s hard to believe it could happen in our country,”

Vance said, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “But isn’t it illegal?”

“If only it were that simple,”

I scoffed. “In the 1970s, a judge in one case acknowledged that the US was sterilizing somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people a year, all of them with lower incomes.”

I started flipping through my folders to find the printout of the case. “Relf,”

I mumbled as I rummaged through the folders. “Relf, Relf. Aha!”

I held it high in the air like a bloodstained weapon at a crime scene. “They threatened to take away their welfare benefits if they didn’t comply. It says so right here.”

I waved the paper again. “The judge in that case prohibited federally funded sterilization without ‘informed consent.’ But it doesn’t say anything about state funding. It doesn’t stop the states from doing the exact same thing.”

“Yeesh.”

Vance shook his head. “And nothing has changed in the fifty years since that case? How can that be?”

“In Tennessee in 20,”

I told him, “a judge offered reduced sentences to any inmates willing to use Nexplanon, a birth control implant that prevents pregnancy for four years. At least that dude was an equal opportunist because he offered men the option of reduced sentences too, but only in exchange for vasectomies. But 20! And that California prison? That was also less than a decade ago. It’s not over, not even remotely, Vance.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it,”

he said. “I just . . .”

He hesitated, but I nodded to encourage him to speak freely.

“Look,”

he said, “I agree one thousand percent that if this shit is happening at Hydeford, it has to be stopped. But I really wish you’d bring this case back to the firm, let them handle it.”

“But you know they won’t.”

“Jess,”

Vance continued, “all you know is that they won’t move forward if you’re the lead attorney on the case. You never asked if they’d take the case if you removed yourself.”

“But I can’t remove myself. I have to do this. It has to be me.”

“Why?”

Vance asked.

I clamped my lips closed to prevent myself from mentioning my great-grandfather. I knew Vance’s first response would be about how my sordid family history reflected on him. He’d worry how it would impact his image with his own family to have chosen someone who came from a man like Grandpa Harry. Never mind the embarrassment he’d feel with his podcast community if it came out that he’d married the descendant of someone responsible for so many of the losses the podcast was meant to rectify.

But if the truth ever came to light, as the truth so often does—and if I won this case and better protected the women at Hydeford—Vance would have that to hold on to. Despite my deplorable family history, I would have tried to help the Hydeford women. What kind of person wouldn’t? And yet, the case seemed to be turning into a compulsion for me, maybe because it had the power to redeem me—the power to redeem us both. But I couldn’t tell Vance any of that.

“Because I feel this in my bones,”

I said instead. “Maybe because I’m a woman? I don’t know. I just worry the firm won’t do what needs to be done, and I don’t understand why you’re so dead set against me working this case.”

I could see the disappointment settling over his face as he let out a breath and uncrossed his legs, rising from where he’d been sitting.

Moments ago, we might have been making progress, and now I’d ruined it again.

“There’s leftover Chinese in the fridge,”

I told him, realizing suddenly that in my current “teeny bit pregnant”

state, maybe I shouldn’t be eating food with MSG. Or was MSG even a thing anymore? I clearly still had a lot to learn about being pregnant. Starting with how to best share the news with my husband while also being utterly at odds with him. Even so, it was well past time to tell him. I took a deep breath, preparing to just blurt it out.

Before I formed the words, Vance said, “You know, I just don’t understand what’s with you lately. You’ve gone from this organized, deliberate, up-and-coming attorney to a woman who seems intent on destroying everything in her path. You’re literally lighting your whole life on fire. Why? For the women at Hydeford? I understand how awful it is, whatever’s happening to them. What you’re describing sounds like an Orwellian horror movie, and of course something like that has to be stopped—but by you alone? You’re on some ego trip, insisting you can do everything on your own when these women would clearly fare better with someone else taking the lead. You certainly don’t care one iota how this could impact my own reputation at work. I mean . . .”

He let out a cynical laugh. “Who’s to say you won’t fuck this up just like you fucked up Shantrane?”

I blinked at his words.

“Wow, Vance,”

I said, trying to digest what had just come out of his mouth. “Just . . . wow. You don’t understand one-millionth of what you’re talking about, and you’re being a complete and utter asshole.”

Vance stared back at me long and hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “I don’t know what is happening here, but I can’t do this. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought, but I just can’t do it anymore.”

“Can’t do what?”

“This. Us.”

He motioned between us with his hand. “I have to go.”

He walked into the bedroom and called over his shoulder, “I’m packing a bag.”

“Wait, what? Vance, no.”

I hurried after him, but he was already pulling a duffel out of the closet and filling it with clothing. “You can’t just leave because we had a fight.”

“A fight? This isn’t just one fight, Jessa,”

he said. “I’m talking about weeks and weeks of arguing, of us never agreeing about anything, of you going full steam ahead, never pausing to let me into your thought processes, and on and on you go, ignoring what I tell you to do and just bulldozing everything in your way.”

As he stuffed clothing into his duffel, I floundered.

“But . . . no! You can’t just run away from this. Where are you even going?”

I demanded.

“I just need out. Out of all of this.”

He waved his hands in the air, like he was indicating everything that constituted our life together.

“You’re leaving me?”

I nearly shrieked. My hand shot to my abdomen, as if to protect the secret fetus from the sight and sound of what was happening around it.

“Yes, Jessa.”

Vance spat out the words. “I. Am. Leaving. You.”

Within minutes he was out the door. It happened so quickly, it felt like I might have imagined the whole thing. He couldn’t really mean it, right? He’d cool down and come back in the morning, wouldn’t he?

I needed to talk to Gram, the only other person who would understand what I was going through and help me think through my next steps. But as I picked up my cell phone, I noticed it was already close to eleven o’clock. She would be sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake her. Even if I were to try, she slept like a hibernating bear and wouldn’t pick up anyway.

Moving back to the living room, I flopped down into the corner of the sectional sofa. It was always my favorite place to curl up next to Vance when we were reading or watching a movie. But now Vance was gone. And I was alone. The apartment was silent except for the quiet hum of the refrigerator coming from the kitchen. I realized that, at thirty-one years old, I had landed exactly where I’d always been most afraid of finding myself: with nobody. But then I thought of the baby growing inside me. I was not alone. I had the baby. As I held my hand against my belly, thinking of the little life working itself into existence, I knew the only way I could mother any child was to stand up for what I believed was right. No matter what else it cost me.