Again, I extend the scissors toward my daughter, smiling. But instead of taking them from me she drops the shoebox, slaps her hands over her ears, and starts screaming.
The woman’s name is Ana Clairmont. Ana, she tells me, is short for Anaïs.
“First things first,” she says, within moments of arriving at the house. “Would you prefer Mathilde or Tilly?” She pronounces my given name perfectly, and I tell her so.
“I lived with my French grandparents for a summer as a teenager. Learned to speak fluently.”
Ana is dressed in lavender scrubs, the MotherWise emblem on the upper left-hand side of her top. Her wiry gray hair is tucked into a bun. She’s polite yet efficient with her questions, no extraneous small talk. I get the sense those blue-gray eyes miss nothing, that she is the no-nonsense sort.
“Tilly or Mathilde, either is fine,” I reply.
Ana regards me curiously. “You don’t have a preference?”
I pause for a beat. “I prefer Mathilde.”
Ana also used to prefer her French name, but “everyone butchered it, so I changed it and now it seems easier to stick with Ana.”
“I understand exactly,” I say.
“Well, Mathilde it is.” She holds a small tablet in hand and types something into it. We’re sitting at my kitchen table, cups of now lukewarm tea in front of us. It’s the day after Christmas. The day after I cut out my MotherWise tattoo while the cinnamon buns baked, after my dead mother told me to.
“So, let me go over how this works,” Ana says. Her eye contact is intense, and I wait for her to blink. She doesn’t.
“I’m your ‘personal health connector’—the term MotherWise uses—though I like ‘nurse,’ because everyone understands what that means. I’m here to make the rest of your pregnancy smooth and easy.”
My lips are dry, my arm throbbing under the large bandage that covers a bio-printed skin graft. The wound, though shallow, was too large and ragged for stitches. I’ve been home from the hospital for a few hours, the graft surgery done late last night.
“For now it’s only me,” Ana says. “Morning and afternoon in person, and one evening video visit. Heads up, my avatar is from over ten years ago. I used to be a blonde, and things were…perkier.” She gives a wry look. “Vanity is boring, but it’s hard to let go of.”
I nod and smile politely, unsure of how to behave in front of Ana—and by proxy, MotherWise.
“I’m pro-aging, in case you’re wondering. But there’s no harm in reminiscing from time to time,” Ana adds, not looking at me as she taps something into the tablet. “So, I’m going to become a familiar addition to your household, at least during the daytime. If needed, there are night nurses as well.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” I’m mortified to need one of these health connectors, let alone round-the-clock care. “This seems excessive, to be honest, Ana. My mother-in-law is here most of the day with me.”
At this she pauses briefly. “Honey, if you take kitchen shears to your own arm, you get me, at a minimum. It’s that simple.”
I look down at my hands, clenched in my lap. I’m embarrassed by what happened, yes, but also terrified. Who wouldn’t be? I went intothe kitchen to get scissors to open Clementine’s Christmas present and then sliced a two-inch-by-two-inch hole into my arm before returning to my family like nothing happened. Bleeding all over the floor, feeling no pain. Not the actions of a stable person.
“We’ll keep an eye on those zinc levels,” Ana adds. “And watch your pressure, too.”
After Wyatt called the ambulance—something I repeatedly said was wholly unnecessary, even as my arm bled through the kitchen towel Shelby held in place—I was taken to the hospital’s MotherWise unit.
“You’re in shock,” the paramedic said, when I explained it didn’t hurt at all andsurely I don’t need an ambulance. Wyatt spoke over me, despite me being perfectly lucid by then. “She’s pregnant. Almost twenty-one weeks.” At least they left the sirens off.
A battery of tests pointed to a zinc overdose.
“I’m guessing the mixed nuts, plus the supplement from the vitamin and mineral pack,” Dr. Rice explained. I felt awful that he had to come in on Christmas. He said it was fine,young kids and early starts and all that. “You have a sensitivity to the mineral, Tilly. In very rare cases it can cause auditory hallucinations.”
I ended up telling Wyatt—and then Dr. Rice—the truth, or part of it, anyway. My tattoo was itching horribly and then Iheardsomeone tell me to cut it out of my arm, after which I went into this trancelike state. I don’t remember the actual cutting, something Dr. Rice says is “the best Christmas gift that doesn’t come under a tree.”
I leave out the part about who suggested it, as well as the fact that I was also seeing her somewhat regularly.
“What about a new tracker?” Wyatt asks Ana now. I almost forgot he was in the kitchen with us, leaning against the pantry door and so out of my sight line.
“Doc Rice thinks Mathilde had a reaction to the tattoo itself. Hence the itching,” Ana says, addressing Wyatt. “Safer to leave it out of her body for now.”
“Can I still work?” I ask. “My arm feels okay.”
