Annabelle
Sabrina brings books from the library. Guide to Home Birth. Birthing Better. What to Expect for Baby’s First Year.
You flip open the guide to home birth and even the illustrations make you queasy. The organs crammed around the fetus, floating in its watery sack.
“I can’t,” you say, shutting the book.
Sabrina rolls her eyes. “Fine, I’ll read them first and tell you what you have to know.
” She pulls a book from the top of the stack and studies it with the concentration she had reserved for the notebook she was always scribbling in back when she was still in school.
With the concentration you recognize when she stitched your arm back together.
You remember something she said last year.
Too bad I’m not like you, good at school. Or else I’d study to be a nurse.
She bites her lip, takes a pencil from her backpack and circles one word, another.
The old habit from when you were in elementary school.
Circling words to look up in the dictionary when you went back to the library.
You look at the ceiling but you can still hear it, the drag of her pencil around one word, then another, then another.
There is so much the two of you do not know.
You cannot imagine life beyond this thing that is waiting for you, the thing you have heard stories of but cannot picture.
Mother Leeds in the circle of chanting women, cursing and writhing with pain.
Blood. The dark coil of a cord. It is like how you have known, a fact crouching in the back of your mind, that you will die one day.
It is coming for you, but impossible to imagine your way into the moment, to prepare.
“It’s going to be okay, Annabelle.”
“Tell me again, about the plan,” you say to Sabrina, as she stands over the stove stirring a seasoning packet into a pot of ramen.
You’ve lost track of how many days you’ve been out of school, though you still refer to it that way in your head.
As though you’ve only been sick. As though you’ll return.
“We’ll get our own place. An apartment somewhere.
Maybe by the ocean. We can take her for walks on the boardwalk.
” You close your eyes and for a second you savor it.
Your mother used to take you to see the ocean.
Not in summer when it was hot and crowded, but in the shoulder season, when the sand was cold on your bare feet and you had the beaches to yourselves, save for a few dog walkers and old men with their metal detectors.
You picture you and Sabrina, together, the salt in the air making your hair go wavy.
Taking turns pushing a carriage along the shoreline.
Sometimes you listen, the way you’d listen to your mother tell fantastical bedtime stories when you were girls. Today, with your back aching and your body feeling so heavy and tired, you push her.
“Where are we going to get the money for that?” Your father left last month, and you find yourself hoping it is for good. Something about an oil rig, more money than he could ever make in this backward town. He said he’d send some back, but you all know that’s not true.
“I told you, I’m working on that. We’ll get you to a doctor soon. It will be okay.”
“Don’t ask him. The Coyote,” you say. There’s still a complicit agreement between you two, to not use his real name—not that you even know it. You don’t want to make him more real, more a part of this, than he has to be. Only you and Sabrina matter now.
Sabrina doesn’t say anything, only gets up from the table. “Where are you going?” you ask her, but she doesn’t turn. You hear the front door slam.
You flip open another one of the books. How to know labor has started.
Even the phrases make you queasy. Bloody show.
Mucus plug. You snap it shut and vow not to look at them again.
Sabrina says she’ll do it. Sabrina says she’ll learn.
And even with all that has passed between you, you trust her more than anyone else in the world.
Your breath has started to get short and shallow.
The thing in you tumbles and punches and kicks.
You piss every twenty minutes, even in the night.
You wait, for someone from school to show up and yank you back into your life.
To ask you what you are doing. Miss Hamilton, Principal Kohley.
All they would need to do is knock on the door, a single look to understand.
The house seems smaller as you get bigger.
As you think about another person nestled inside of you.
Sabrina stays up late reading the books, making notes in her notebook.
Sometimes you catch Sabrina looking at you like you are a riddle. Once when you leave the bathroom she reaches under your shirt, her hands brisk and cold, feels the hardness of your belly, where you don’t even let your own hands stray anymore.
“What are you doing?”
“They say you can feel where the baby’s head is. If it’s breech that will be a more complicated delivery.”
“Breech?”
“Feet first. I can’t tell like this, come lay down.”
She guides you onto your back on her bed, lifts your shirt, and presses into you. You watch her face as she tenses her fingertips along your stomach, pressing, pressing.
“I think it’s normal. I think this is the head.”
“That’s good,” you say. Normal. But the phrase the head sends a wave of sickness through you.
She turns away and counts off the days on her calendar, running backward through the pages, backward through time.
“I think it will be any week now. But first babies tend to come late.”
Maybe it will never come, you think. It will stay locked between your pelvis, your body won’t do what the books say it is made to do.
Instead, it will bend to your will. It will make sure that nothing ever changes, not before you are ready.
Not until Sabrina finishes looking up all those words she’s circled and written down.
Your eyes catch on a basket in the corner. Stacks of clean sheets. Tiny clothes that you have to look away from, the pink tags from the thrift store still attached.
One day she tapes the end of a paper towel tube closed, fills it with dried black beans, and tapes the other end shut, gives it a shake, adds more tape, shakes it again, smiles to herself.
A rattle. Her sleeve slips as she hands it to you to try and you see the black-blue of a fresh bruise around her wrist.
“What are you doing with him still?” you ask.
“I’ll fix it, Annabelle. He’s going to pay for this. He’s going to help.”
“I don’t want his help.”
“Money, Annabelle. We’re going to need money.”
“Why would he give us money?”
“He has some secrets worth protecting. A job worth protecting. And we aren’t the only ones.”
“The only ones what?”
“The only girls. He likes to brag about it. To get me to do what he wants. The others do this. The others like that.”
For a second her voice breaks and she looks away from you.
You put a hand on her arm and her skin feels fever-hot.
You realize you still have no idea, really, what Sabrina has gone through.
That the Coyote has remade you both in different ways, and it makes you so sorrowful that you want to lie down and cry, the way the two of you did together when your mother first left.
But it still gives you a bad feeling. Bringing him into this.
The idea of revenge. Yes, of course, since the night at the Cranberry Festival a part of you has been simmering with rage.
That he moves through the world so unencumbered, while you have been sick, exhausted, colonized, exiled from your own life.
But that doesn’t mean you want anything from him.
Sabrina, on the other hand, wants to draw blood.
You feel her thirst for it. All that energy you felt coming off her as she curled her hair or put on another coat of mascara or filed her nails, now it is in service of something else.
Of you, of some plan. And that scares you. Drop it, you tell her. Let it go.
“It will be fine,” Sabrina says, but she keeps her eyes on the rattle, turns it in her hands.