Chapter Thirteen
So I went home to wait. I had no choice. I did the only thing I was allowed to do.
Praying for a miscarriage is the basest kind of hell.
Women in my position—unexpectedly pregnant, not wanting to be, not allowed to do anything to stop it—must pray for miscarriages all the time, but for everyone else, a miscarriage is the cruelest injustice, the worst place the dice can land.
Praying for something so terrible felt like tempting fate, like a failure to count my blessings, lack of gratitude and perspective.
But this was the only exit I’d been offered from a corner I had not backed into myself.
I have had one. A miscarriage. It was after Alice, before Max.
So early I probably wouldn’t have noticed except it was my third time, and I recognized that dizzy exhausted woolliness that came on suddenly and did not abate.
Then one day after school, sitting in my classroom helping Diego Tellez, it abated.
Diego hadn’t needed help so much as company or maybe just someone who cared about The Great Gatsby more than his football teammates did.
We were sitting at my desk chatting about the inherent unreliability of first-person narrators when the cramping started, easily ignored, could’ve been anything really, hunger, gas, the ancient chair the district provided with two of four wheels broken and no stuffing in the seat to speak of anymore.
But then blood between my legs, unmistakable and wrong.
Still, I let Diego ramble on. The desk and horrible chair kept me and what was happening from his view.
I imagined it wouldn’t just be blood on the back of my pants—horrible enough in front of a student, my colleagues—but might be gushing, surging, pumping out, like a wound, like a well.
I knew, somehow, that whatever was happening was either nothing or already everything, so there was no rush.
Diego wrapped up and ambled off to football practice. I took off my cardigan, tied it around my waist, waddled as gently as I could to the faculty restroom. It was blessedly empty. There, it was blood on my pants. Not gushing. And also, plainly, everything.
I already had two little girls at home, I told myself, and wasn’t that enough? My friend Glenda Givens in Social Studies had had two miscarriages and no children to salve that loss. And this was so early. But I found it didn’t matter. Lost was lost. A child not to be. My child not to be.
And then, two years later, it had made being pregnant with Max nine long months of anxiety.
With Darcy and Alice, pregnancy had felt limitless.
Life perpetual. Cosmic almost. But with Max, I was afraid.
Afraid and tearful and forewarned. And prayerful.
Please let this one stay. Let this one live. Let it be. Let it be. Let it be.
Which made my current prayer—Let it go away, please take it away—feel grotesque, monstrous. Forsaken. Like I wasn’t sufficiently grateful for Max, like I wasn’t sufficiently grateful for my miracle, for all my miracles.
In fact, if anything, I was overly grateful for Max.
We had followed all the books and the pamphlets from the doctor’s office as well as we could with Darcy and Alice, crib training, self-soothing, muscling out those interminable nights when we made ourselves let them cry until they fell asleep.
Whereas Max slept with us. He napped in our arms. He overnighted between us in our bed.
Darcy and Alice had had a playpen I’d consign them to sometimes—when I had to cook dinner or go to the bathroom, yes, but also when I needed twenty minutes to myself, when the long hours of the afternoon moved slow as sloths, when building yet another castle out of blocks seemed as possible as building an actual castle.
With Max, we didn’t even pull the thing out of the attic.
We clambered down onto the floor with him instead.
We cherished those slow hours. We built every castle.
From the beginning, Max seemed to trail magic in his wake.
When he fell on the playground, his knees didn’t skin.
When he let go of a balloon, it tangled somehow in the stroller so it didn’t float away.
Class bullies ignored him. Mosquitoes eschewed his blood.
So when my bell rang the morning after that horrible gynecology appointment, I was less surprised than you’d think to find Max at the door, apparently conjured by my ruminations.
“Supplies,” he explained from behind a giant box. He deposited it on the coffee table and, like an actual magician, started drawing from it an impossible array of items.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“They can do without me for the day.”
“Didn’t they do without you yesterday?”
“They can do without me for two days.”
For all I understood of Max’s job, this could well have been the case.
“Jar opener,” he announced proudly about a … well, pardon me, but it looked like a sex toy.
“How do I”—I turned the squat white comma over and around—“use this?”
“I’m not sure,” he conceded, then pulled out the next item. “More straightforward jar opener.” This one looked like an ice scraper for your windshield—though, carless, I had even less call for that than for sex toys.
“Can’t I just … twist with a towel?”
“Are you a professional arm wrestler?”
“I don’t eat a lot of things in jars.”
The next items were all in jars. Bread-and-butter pickles, horseradish pickles, half-sours, Russian dills, cornichons. I looked at him bewildered.
“Pregnant people crave pickles,” he said.
“I’m not going to be pregnant long enough to get through this many pickles.”
“But just in case.”
“No one has ever been pregnant long enough to get through this many pickles.”
“I accounted for that.” He started pulling out more jars. Applesauce, tomato sauce, jam, beets, olives, sauerkraut.
“You know I mostly eat downstairs in the dining room?”
“Which is why I also brought these.” A pink stapler and a set of colored pens. Mittens so furry they would have been overkill for winter back east, let alone October in Texas. A sugar bowl.
“I already have a sugar bowl,” I said.
“Who’s to say you couldn’t use another?”
Me? I thought. Anyone, actually? But he wasn’t really asking. Next, he pulled a box from his box. Inside that one were earrings shaped like silver bolts of lightning.
“Why lightning?” I said.
“You love lightning.”
“I do?”
“Yes! You and Dad both. When I was little, we were always watching storms together. You guys would point out the window and say, ‘Look at that bolt!’ ‘Ooh, that one was even bigger!’ ‘Wow! That was a close one!’”
When Darcy woke to thunder and ran scared into our bedroom in the middle of the night, I’d scoot closer to Roger so she could crawl under the covers, then roll over and go back to sleep.
When Alice learned about lightning rods in fifth grade and became concerned enough about our umbrella tips to propose covering them in the only malleable rubber she could think of, Roger settled for explaining that condoms were too thin for the job and left it at that.
But with Max, we made storms into celebrations, wonders to behold, and sat him on our laps to regard a sky full of electricity as grandeur, benevolent magic sent from on high, so he would feel blessed instead of afraid.
So we would feel blessed instead of afraid.
It had worked for so long, for Max and for us too, but a storm is a storm—turbulent, buffeting, unstable—and what I was now was thunderstruck, not so much shocked as stunned to find myself first pregnant then denied the means to become unpregnant then praying for the way out I’d been so grateful all these years to avoid.
But the truth is thunder doesn’t strike anything. It’s loud. It’s scary. But it’s only noise, harmless, a distraction. It’s the lightning that strikes. It’s the lightning you don’t anticipate.
It’s the lightning that’ll kill you.
I threaded the earrings in and shook my head so the bolts brushed against my neck. “You’re right, baby.” I leaned over and kissed Max on the cheek. “I’ve always loved a good storm.”