5. The Immaculate Rebirth of Nicki Duran #2
I remember the line of anxious patients spilling out the clinic doors and around the block.
“And counting.”
Ten hours later, I’d been poked and prodded just about everywhere.
Drained of blood. Slathered with cold jelly for a sonogram that showed absolutely nothing.
Do you know what it’s like to have a black hole inside you?
Not in some teen-goth-angst poetry way, I mean the complete absence of light and life that confirmed the thing inside me was real.
There was no sound. I’ve only ever seen the imaging done on TV and in movies.
Most of my friends were women who’d chosen careers or themselves over motherhood.
I wasn’t always there for Leti after she found her suburban prince, and Chrissy had long become a fairy-tale warning, and the reason I was scared of sex until I was twenty.
Yeah, some of my cousins had kids, but we weren’t close enough that I was there at doctor’s checkups and birthing classes.
I didn’t know what to expect when someone tried to see through you, into you, and found nothing.
On the way home, I clutch tight to my souvenirs—a bill for four grand that the insurance won’t cover, a strawberry lollipop, and a picture of the negative space in my womb. It reminds me of trying to make photocopies that one summer I worked at my college’s English department.
When I walk inside my apartment, I shrug off my puffer coat.
Kick my sodden snow boots into the corner.
I check every window to make sure they’re locked.
I shove all my clothes aside in the closet and knock all over the walls.
Perhaps I have always been searching for a way out, a way to another land, but this time, I’m looking for how a monster might have come in.
Every time I knock, I wait a beat. My heart shrivels with every second I anticipate someone, something, might answer back.
Only after I’ve made sure I’m secure do I take my clothes off and hop into the shower.
It takes six pumps of soap before I feel like the sonogram jelly isn’t on me.
I cup my hands around the swell of my belly.
I can feel something inside me. I wonder if that is what it feels like to be an astronaut floating in the dead of space.
I wonder if that is why this is happening to me, because for so long, my life had felt like a big empty, like I was adrift in a great big nothing. Nihil. Nihilnaut.
After, I microwave some dinner, then put on my comfort pajamas and curl into bed.
The best part of living alone is that I don’t have to explain to anyone that I’m going to sleep at five p.m. after eating pizza rolls.
I turn on the news just to have pundits in the background while I deep dive my situation.
They say upward of 1,634 women have reported waking up twelve weeks pregnant.
In other countries, the World Health Organization has dispatched teams to handle the crisis.
In the United States, health gurus are going viral with mushroom tonics; churches are setting up tents to shelter and guide these “Immaculate Ones” from dreaded government testing and, heaven forbid, abortions.
There’d be no point. The abortions aren’t working, according to my doctor.
A woman who underwent an immediate procedure claimed they dilated her uterus, that they inserted the vacuum and scooped her out, but there was nothing there.
And yet, all her tests signaled she was still pregnant.
A Rorschach blot swimming in her uterus.
I leave my phone face down on my nightstand next to my glass of water.
I stay curled up in the fetal position, legs tangled in fresh sheets as my phone buzzes off the ledge.
My upstairs neighbor is pacing in a circle, and I can’t even summon enough energy to hate her heavy tread as usual.
The school across the street lets out early.
Helicopters fly too low, and the soliloquy of New York City traffic mutates into a raucous scream of confusion.
I rest my hands on my bump, trace the knot of my belly button like it’s the thing that holds all of me together.
“What are you?” I whisper to it.
And I feel a tug, as if it wants to answer back.
Over the course of four weeks, 756,332 Immaculate Ones are reported, at least the ones who come forward. That’s what they call us. Immaculate Ones, coined by the friggin’ pope. I hate it.
My mom, who’d used my meager wedding and baby fund to buy herself a retirement condo in the ass-end of Florida, calls me crying.
She only knows how to cry in Spanish, and I put her on speakerphone and let her get it out.
Twenty minutes later, she’s still talking about “el milagrito” and I can’t help but think that turning a miracle into a diminutive transforms it into a scream.
Part of it, at least. Milagrito. Mila. Grito.
Milagrito. Little miracle. But I only focus on the end of the word, separate in meaning. Grito. A scream.
Did a part of me scream? Cry out into the universe for a baby? I want to say no. I’m not one of those women who chose a career over a husband and kids. I just like being alone too much. But now I’m not alone. I have my miracle. My little scream.
I name the black void inside me Mila. I jokingly say I don’t have to have a gender reveal party because I already know I will give birth to an abyss.
That sets my mother crying for another twenty minutes in which I am reminded that I am a terrible child, and she came all this way from Ecuador to suffer at the hands of her cold, distant daughter.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her because I don’t know what else to say.
I don’t know how to talk to her. I don’t know how to unscramble the conspiracy theories that have rotted her brain out of empathy.
I know I still love her, even when I sometimes don’t like her, and I think that is why I never wanted to have a child.
I couldn’t stand it if I disappointed someone I loved.
Now there is this inexplicable thing inside me, and I want to hate it.
I want to be repulsed by it. I want to be afraid, like the women in the news, like Heather Bishop, who went to work only to go to the roof of the building and jump, or like the cruise full of Immaculate Ones who chartered a yacht, sailed to international waters, and dove into the Atlantic with weights tied to their ankles.
But I don’t.
When Leticia visits me, she brings enough Chinese food that they send six sets of forks and chopsticks. At first, she hesitates to hug me, like she might catch it.
“You were like that when Chrissy got preggo, too.”
“This shit is viral, Nicki. I read they’re rounding up the Immaculate Ones to study.”
“Hence why I haven’t left my apartment in three months.” I feel my back crack when I sit down, but in a good way. Everything about me feels swollen and sore. I’m in my body, but it isn’t quite mine anymore.
“What do you do with your garbage? Your mail?”
I shrug. “My super has a crush on me, so he does it.”
“Better be careful. Sometimes men will propose to pregnant women.”
“What men?” I shout, laughing so hard the pigeons on my fire escape take flight. “Shut up. Thank you, I needed a laugh.”
But Leti isn’t smiling. She’s staring at my comically spherical stomach.
When we were in school, we used to put basketballs under our skirts and look in the mirror to see what being knocked up would look like.
Now pregnancy is as alien to me as it was back then.
Only difference is I thought growing up meant having answers.
Leti and I shovel noodles and rice into our faces and watch music videos on YouTube.
“You’re scary, you know that?” She sets her carton of food down and fishes a blunt from a designer cigarette case.
“How?” I rub my belly.
“Because you’re acting so normal. You don’t even know how this happened to you. No one does.”
“What should I do?” I snatch the blunt from her coffin-shaped nails and watch her pretty face twist in disgust when I light it.
Take a puff. “Kill myself? Shoot up a hospital like that ‘Gods Warriors’ group who think I’m carrying the devil’s spawn inside me?
And also don’t know where to find an apostrophe. ”
I try to hand her the blunt back, but Leti holds her hand up. “Keep it.” Plucks another, one that won’t have my saliva on it. She lights up. “Oh, I brought you some stuff.”
She points to one of the many bags she toted into my apartment. A pink onesie sleeve sticks out from between the zippers.
“It’s just a few things I held on to from when the kids were born.”
I wonder what a black hole will look like dressed up in tulle dresses and bows.
There’s a swirl inside me, and I think Mila is pleased.
Sometimes I wonder if she can see through my eyes, or if she can read my thoughts.
I’ve gone on a deep dive into pregnancy forums online, and the whole experience feels textbook.
Discomfort. Hot flashes. Swelling. Appetite. Mood swings.
I’ve eaten my entire carton of lo mein, and reach for seconds when Leti chuckles. “Damn, girl.”
“Don’t shame me. I’m eating for two.”
“You look great, actually. That’s what’s so freaky about all this. Not to mention how insanely normal you’re acting. Did you hear that there’s an eighty-five-year-old pregnant nun in Germany? And an eleven-year—”
“We have a group chat,” I tell her. We, in fact, do not have a group chat.
“Are you serious?”
“No, but I’ve been invited to a few support groups.”
“Why won’t you go?”
I don’t know how to explain to her that I don’t need to be around a bunch of strangers just because we’re experiencing the same weird science.
What are we going to share? The fear of our alien bodies?
The fear of what will happen when we all crack open or hatch or burst or splinter open in less than three months?
I don’t need support. I need food and rent money and maybe a hug.