5. The Immaculate Rebirth of Nicki Duran
The Immaculate Rebirth of Nicki Duran
Zoraida Córdova
There was this one time in the ninth grade when my friends and I cut school for no reason in particular, other than we were restless and young and wanted a place to be ourselves.
It was the dead of winter, and my family had just bought a new house in Queens Village, New York.
There was no heat. The walls prepped for renovation.
We tested our strength by punching manicured fists through brittle sheetrock and moldy wallpaper in search of a black hole and doorway to anywhere else, as if there existed a place for lost girls, savage girls, fucked-up and quiet and troubled and loud and unruly and unfixable girls.
When we tired ourselves out, we gathered under our North Face jackets, passing around a slender bottle of vodka, a joint, and a book of fairy tales I’d checked out from the Jamaica Public Library.
“The real stories,” I’d said, not yet understanding every story is older than it thinks. “Not the glittery bullshit cartoon ones.”
And so, my friends let me read to them about unhappy endings. Princesses raped in their sleep, butchered limbs, cannibal witches, hungry wolves, mermaids turned to foam over basic boys.
“What the fuck,” Leticia said, then passed the cheap Bud she’d stolen from her brother. “That’s crazy.”
“I think I prefer the Disney ones,” Chrissy said before she threw up purple vodka slushie and pizza chunks.
A few months later, she found out she was pregnant, and her parents pulled her out of school.
Sent her back to Guyana without so much as a goodbye call or letter.
That was before we had complete access to everyone.
Before slender cell phones and unread notifications and DMs from classmates you were never friends with desperately trying to hook a line into fast-fading memories.
On the morning I woke up three months pregnant with no memory of what, or who, might be the cause of my predicament, I found myself thinking of that cold, cold day over two decades ago when, for a little while, the scariest thing about the world was reading a book of fairy tales.
The intake nurse at my doctor’s office looks more and more haggard every time she reenters the examination room.
When I arrived at the clinic, there was a line out the door, but it was flu season, so I didn’t think much of it.
Everything after I woke up and felt the…
the… I can’t say it, let alone think it.
Everything after the baby bump was a blur.
I’d just seen nurse Kayla a few weeks ago for my pap smear and checkup, and I was decidedly not pregnant.
She runs through a list of questions she must ask, dabbing her forehead with the back of her hand every few minutes.
Stuff like what brings you here today? And when did you first start to notice your symptoms?
When was your last menstrual cycle? Family medical history?
Sexual history? And you’re sure, you’re absolutely sure you were not pregnant before today?
“It’s not something I would forget,” I say, and even as I say it, I know that isn’t always true.
There are stories—fairy tales and nightmares alike—of slumbering girls, chosen girls, unlucky girls who find themselves in compromised positions. But this isn’t some immaculate conception shit, and I am not in a rom-com where a doctor inseminates the wrong patient.
The nurse untucks a necklace from beneath her scrubs.
I can’t see the detail, but I know it’s a saint or a Virgin Mary.
I have a similar one at home. Nurse Kayla rubs the gold pendant over and over, her brown eyes affixed to the bump beneath my clasped hands.
I didn’t realize I was holding my own belly until her penetrating stare makes me self-conscious, and I want to ask her if she is staring so long because she knows what I’m growing inside, and maybe that is why her face is so full of pity and fear and awe.
She snaps out of it. Stretches a smile that cracks her chewed-up lower lip.
A ruby drop hangs there before she laps it up, and hands me a cup to pee in.
After, I wait. The room smells sterile. I try not to move even as something inside me stirs.
I imagine it like a tadpole swimming in a pond.
A fly trapped in the bulbous lamp fixture on my ceiling.
A fat worm working its way through loamy soil.
When the doctor comes in to confirm that I am, in fact, pregnant, I don’t believe her.
“That’s not possible,” I say, and then I say it again. “There’s no way.”
Dr. Zaynab shifts in her seat, her mouth open; pink tongue stuck prodding against the inside of her lower lip.
I’m unsure if her pause stretches like taffy or if I’m imagining it, until she finally says, “The test is ninety-nine percent accurate.” Her even tone edges on confrontational, brow furrowed at my challenge. “You’re not on birth control.”
“I’m not dating. Or sexually active.” A desperate laugh bubbles from my chest. “Unless you count my toy drawer.”
She doesn’t laugh with me.
Chrissy once said her cousin got pregnant from jerking off her boyfriend in a hot tub.
Claimed another girl got pregnant from cleaning herself with the same T-shirt her guy had used to wipe semen from her back.
Another girl, whose parents had refused to sign the permission slip to watch a sex-ed video, believed babies were made from tongue kissing.
When you’re young and stupid and know shit about the world, you find answers in gossip.
What is gossip but communal warnings? And what is a fairy tale if not a warning in a tulle dress?
I’m not naive anymore, but even I find myself grasping for those innocent explanations, because believing the alternative is not an option. “Give me the test again.”
“Ms. Duran, can you think of any incident when you might have—”
“When I what?” I lean forward, defensive. “Might have forgotten protection and wound up pregnant?”
“It’s very rare but has been known to happen. Teen girls giving birth after not having realized they hadn’t been menstruating.”
“I had a bloody period two weeks ago.”
She shakes her head, but repeats my hormone levels at me and adds, once again, “It’s very rare but has been known to happen. Though”—she rubs a trembling hand down her face, as if she can reset her worry into medical indifference—“less and less common these days.”
I don’t understand what she means by that, so I sidestep it. “I’m thirty-nine. I’ve done a pretty good job avoiding getting knocked up this whole time. So what is it? A tumor? Immaculate conception? Did I get raped by a ghost? Fucking aliens? What the fuck?”
When I was twenty, I went camping with a guy I was obsessed with.
I hated camping, but I lusted after him in the way someone does before their frontal lobe matures.
I wanted him to think I was cool and sexy.
I let him fuck me in a tent, a canoe, a hammock.
I let him do everything to me except consider that I might produce a bowel movement, so I plugged myself up with Imodium.
After I got back home, my guts had to be flushed out at the hospital.
For a moment, I consider if this was a repeat of that, but now I’m grasping.
The doctor shifts in her seat before asking, “Is there a possibility that you were passed out?”
“No,” I say, pressing my palm over my racing heart. “I don’t think so. How can I tell if I’m missing time?”
“We’d need more tests.”
“For now. Please.” I swallow but my mouth is dry. “Please.”
“Walk me through your routine,” Dr. Zaynab instructs, cold and distant, even for a doctor who’s grown tired of the world. “Anything that sticks out as unusual.”
My thoughts skitter, recalling everything I did yesterday, the day before, a week ago, two weeks, a month.
I’d been laid off after NovAmerica Airlines went belly up six months ago.
My most frequented places were the movie theater, the gym, and the library—all within spitting distance of my apartment.
I’d been on three dates, none of which had resulted in kisses, and only one in conciliatory sex because it was Christmas, and I always get maudlin on Christmas, missing every life I never got to live.
Then there was Vinny, the last pilot I’d fucked before the layoffs.
But I misremember the last time I saw him and there was no such thing as a delayed pregnancy.
Hadn’t I read a news report of a man who’d intentionally impregnated one thousand women after one-night stands?
There were other stories: dark fairy tales.
Warnings. Breaking news after dinner—ugly little pills that put women to sleep.
Fists. Weapons. Monsters who only found power when their prey was unconscious.
Was it so different than that version of Sleeping Beauty where the prince rapes her in her sleep?
We conclude I’m not missing time.
I really am pregnant. Or at least, something is growing inside me. My whole body is numb. I can’t stay in this bright room for much longer without wanting to scream.
“So what am I?” I ask. “A medical marvel?”
Dr. Zaynab wheezes a brittle laugh. I thought she was distant and cold, but I see the truth in her eyes, the tight furrow of her brow and flat line of her lips.
She’s scared. Of me? Of what’s inside me?
Of how it got there? Slowly, she starts, “One instance might make a marvel, but you’re not the first patient today to come in with this condition. ”
I’m unsure I heard her right. I reach for my phone, but forget I’m still in a hospital gown and I’d only grabbed my keys and tiny purse on the way out. “How many?”
“Six,” she says. We repeat the word at each other.
Six?
Six.
Six. How can six people wake up suddenly three months pregnant?
“You’re my number seven, but the news reports keep increasing.”
“Increasing? W-what’s the total?”
“Three hundred,” says the doctor.