I remembered the feeling of little Olivia’s hand in mine.
Had that really happened, or was it only a dream?
Did I nearly steal another woman’s child?
Two women’s children?
The bartender had taken off with my purse too, snatched it right from the front seat while I lay in the back in a daze, leaving the car door unlatched, the interior lights on so that by morning the battery was completely drained. I walked the three miles home with a swollen ankle, clutching the plackets of my shirt together since the buttons had snapped clear off at his hasty hand. I spent the morning after on the telephone with various credit card companies, reporting the cards stolen, despising myself for getting into this situation in the first place, for letting myself be a floozy and a victim. I avowed to pay off my debt and cut the new cards the credit card company would no doubt send me to shreds.
I would never be a victim again.
I’d never trust anyone again.
I would never leave the house for fear I might try and pilfer someone else’s child.
And so I’ve become a recluse, plunged into a state of depression where I go unshowered for days at a time, oftentimes not getting out of bed from morning until night. I eat only when I need to, when the hunger pangs are more than I can bear. I’ve lost my job, no doubt, though no one told me as much, but one can’t expect to stay employed when they haven’t gone to work for thirty-odd days. I’m drowning in debt, I assume, though I haven’t found the energy to drag myself to the mailbox to retrieve the bills, but I’m certain I must be because just last night when I flipped a light switch on, nothing happened. I jiggled the toggle up and down and when that failed, tried another light switch.
It appeared the electricity had been shut off for nonpayment.
I went back to bed in the dark, planning to stay there for the rest of my life, which would be short as I swore off water and food too.
But then this morning the nausea wrenched me from bed, dragging me to the kitchen sink, where again and again I heaved, wondering what in the world was wrong with me.
And it was a slow dawning then, daylight arriving at its own sweet time, one shaft of light at a time.
For thirty-odd days I had lain in bed since my encounter in the back seat of the car, and in those thirty-odd days, my period—my ever-reliable period—hadn’t come.
And now there was the nausea, the vomiting, and though every rational thought in my mind told me it wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true—after all, I was infertile; there was no way I could get pregnant of my own accord, without Dr. Landry’s menagerie of drugs and devices—I knew instinctively that it was true.
I was pregnant.
To say I was happy would be a lie.
It wasn’t that I didn’t savor the thought for a second or two, that I didn’t relish the idea of carrying a child, of birthing a child, of being a mother. There was no greater desire in the whole entire world for me. It’s all I wanted; it’s the only thing that mattered in my life.
But deep inside I knew this child would never come to fruition. A fetus it was, but a baby it would never be. It would be as it was the last time with the heartbeat that was there and then not there, the gallons of blood. I would lose this baby as I had the last, and it would be my purgatory, my punishment, being forced to endure weeks, maybe a month, of pregnancy, knowing as always that it would end with blood.
That trusty, reliable blood.
And so instead of being happy I stood there, back to the countertop, steeling myself for another miscarriage, to lose this baby like I had the last. Certainly the universe wouldn’t let me keep this child. This, truly, was my penance, a gift that was given only to be taken away.
January 15, 1998
Egg Harbor
The joke is on me it seems, for I’ve made it through the first trimester without a single drop of blood.
The baby has survived thirteen weeks in my wasteland of a womb.
Only by necessity have I left the house, taking a job at a local inn where I clean rooms once the guests leave. There’s nothing glamorous about it. Just stripping beds of sheets and washing endless mountains of laundry, scrubbing someone else’s excrement off a toilet seat. The perk of the job, however, is that I essentially speak to no one, working alone in an uninhabited guest room or the laundry room, dealing only with dust spores and mildew, as opposed to the human race.
But the work itself is backbreaking. And those first thirteen weeks of the pregnancy were anything but fun and fancy-free. The morning sickness, the lethargy nearly got the best of me until the empty hotels beds were hard to resist—I envisioned myself sprawled out across them, wrapped up in one of the hotel’s velour robes—but, for as much as I wanted to, I didn’t give in to the whim.
Only second to a baby, I needed this job more than anything.
I haven’t been to see Dr. Landry or another obstetrician, though there’s a slight outgrowth to my midsection now, a bulge that makes my pants fit tightly so that I’ve taken to wearing sweatpants when I’m not stuffed into the uniform I wear for work, the polo shirt and the khaki pants, which I now leave unbuttoned so I don’t flatten the baby.
The cottage is on the market again.
