I scrutinize the little black nub. I haven’t been taken away to some faraway film set—but perhaps the film set has come to me.
“Mama!” Maeve says, more impatiently now.
“I’m coming!” I glance quickly at the house, and then over my shoulder at the fields. I tuck the nub into my skirt pocket and stand up.
14
The day of my discharge,I sat in a wheelchair at the hospital entrance, my child squirming angrily in my arms, my mother’s hands resting firmly on my shoulders, while we waited for my husband to navigate the parking lot pay machine. I swallowed the urge to let the baby roll off my lap, to raise the swaddled blanket over my head and chuck her as far as I could manage.
“Beautiful day,” my mother said.
“It is,” I replied. A car alarm went off in the distance. While my mother hummed the melody to “Lamb of God,” I gazed up at the sky and prayed furiously for death.
At home, I got out of the car, left the baby in the car seat, and walked straight up the stairs and into my childhood bedroom. At some indeterminate point between the moment I told my mother I didn’t think the child was mine and the moment I was discharged, it had been decided that we would be staying at her house for the indefinite future.
I got into bed while my mother carried Clementine upstairs behind me and moved to the diaper table in the corner. “There, there,” she kept saying, over quick Velcro rips. “That’s a good girl.” To whom, I wasn’t sure. I pulled the covers over my head and waited for them to leave.
Time did not pass. I lay beneath the comforter, frozen beneath the frigid beam of His fury, staring up at a gauzy layer of purple fabric, which functioned like a roving eyelid, reducing the world to a series of lights and shadows. It felt like I was a baby, floating in amniotic space. It felt, also, like I was dead, waiting for the Lord to pull the spirit from my hardened body. My mother must have sensed the general direction of my hopelessness, because she kept saying an old Sunday school line to me every time she came upstairs to change a diaper or bring me a meal or help me with a feeding: “Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith, sweetheart.”
I didn’t reply.
Sleep, breastfeed.
Breastfeed, sleep.
Sleep, sleep, sleep.
Breastfeed. Cry.
Breastfeed. Sleep.
Kill yourself.
No—sorry.
Sleep.
At one point my sister came to visit me. Abigail was a mother of two now: she had given birth a few months after my wedding, then immediately gotten pregnant again, and now had a one-month-old in addition to her fourteen-month-old. Two boys: Brandon and Brady. (She thought the matchingBnames were cute. Privately, my mother had concerns about this strategy: If, God willing, Abigail had a family of five or six or seven, would she really have all the names start withB? Wouldn’t we all grow tired of the sound?) As Abigail perched at the foot of my bed, I tensed myself, waiting for some version of my mother’s speech.Doubt your doubts, et cetera!When Abigail finally spoke, though, her voice was so quiet that it nearly blended into the whizzing drone of the rotating fan. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”
I said nothing. Didn’t even let myself exhale, for how surely ayeswould slip out with my breath.
“Not the babies. The babies are—perfect.” She let out a quick ragged gasp. “I’m just so tired. AndBryce—” Another pause. “He always wants to have sex. And I’m just—and the boys are so—”
I closed my eyes. Where were the boys, anyways? Downstairs, probably, with my mother, the only woman in this house who seemed actually interested in taking care of these children.
“I think I might be pregnant again. Can you imagine? Three babies in three years. I can’t believe it. I never thought it would—happen,this fast.”
There was a stirring in my heart, a deep agitation. My sister and I didn’t talk like this. We never had. Our relationship had always felt a bit like the relationship between a queen and a pawn on the chessboard: we danced around each other, sometimes as allies, sometimes as rivals, but never once, in any sense, as equals. The idea that we might finally have found ourselves on equal footing in this moment—as complete and utter failures of motherhood—was not a recognition I was equipped to handle.
“I’ve been thinking about it, you know,” she whispered. “Getting birth control. Bryce doesn’t believe in it, but I heard you can just go to the doctor and get it. Without them knowing, I mean.”
This was my breaking point. I sat up, startling her, and hissed, “Birth control? Lying to your husband? These are sins, Abigail.”
“But—”
“I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, but it’s not fair for you to project your issues onto my life.”
For a moment it looked inevitable that Abigail, crybaby of the family, would collapse into sobs, but she didn’t. Instead, her eyes, liquid soft, seemed to harden and dry. “Of course not. I just wanted you to know, if you’re having a hard time—”
