Ryan often forced me to admit that pregnancy was not the perfect cure. It did not alleviate my depression without side effects, such as nausea, hunger, and delirium. My first pregnancy with Irie completely altered my perspective on “morning sickness.” Nausea was no longer a joke but rather a serious malady, my insides tightening like shoestrings into a triple knot just beneath my rib cage, releasing an aftertaste of rotten chemical eggs. My stomach actually hurt, especially in the evenings, and looking at little alien-ghost babies in the early weeks of development, from The Pregnant Body Book, convinced me I had eaten something rancid—my own baby.
I dreamed I was swallowing jellyfish and eating teacups to kill them, like the old lady who swallowed a spider to catch the fly. I learned pica was a mental disorder, more common among pregnant women and children than the general population, in which those afflicted crave nonnutritive substances such as clay and sand. I diagnosed myself as suffering from pica, as most smells and tastes caused me to gag, and in my dreams I began eating scraps of paper too.
Sometimes I’d cry out in agony just thinking about the recommended spinach diet for loading up on folic acid. Candy tasted good, especially when I chain-sucked Jolly Ranchers, the sourness an effective antidote against acid reflux or vomiting, but real food did not. I was skinny and malnourished, losing, on average, fifteen pounds during each of my first trimesters. For the first twenty weeks, each baby grew inside me like an infection. When I was pregnant with Leo, my midwife prescribed Zofran, an anti-nausea medicine prescribed to cancer patients, and in addition to regular checkups, I scheduled weekly appointments to be pumped full of IV fluids because I could not bring myself to drink. Writhing in bed, feeling ravenous but also queasy, I inexplicably begged my mom to buy me a cheeseburger at Hardee’s. I picked at the sesame seeds while sobbing. Somehow, throughout every pregnancy, I continued to teach. I’d sway, lurch, lean against students’ desks, and try not to vomit up my lectures.
When I was pregnant with Fern, I thought I’d discovered the answer in microwave popcorn. After eating a whole bag at work, I loaded Irie and Leo into the bucket seats of a city bus. When we disembarked, after a twisting drive home, I threw up on my neighbors’ lawn, the hulls from the popped corn flickering in the afternoon sun. The neighborhood dog licked them up. By the time I was pregnant with Francis, I had learned to hypnotize myself into drinking soda, the bubbles massaging my nausea into brief submission. I was weak, dizzy, and trapped deep inside my personal tunnel of survival.
“I can’t understand how anybody suffers chronic pain,” I told a good friend.
“Just think of it as a prison sentence,” she said, laughing. “You’re up for parole in a couple of weeks.” And of course, the second half of the pregnancy always compensated for the first. I was more like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, fattening up for some noble transformation, and when my uterus worked hard to squeeze out babies, the pain was barefaced and intense, not covert and mysterious like morning sickness. Getting pregnant was a secret, but giving birth felt like a public event. In the early stages of pregnancy, I whispered, but in labor, I screamed with joy. Madness came in many colors, and I preferred the rapturous lunatic I became while pregnant to the somber woman I was otherwise.
“You look happy,” a colleague once said, surprised, as I was front-heavy, enormous with the tumor of pregnancy, ready to fall forward on my face. “I’m growing a human inside me,” I said, dotty and moonstruck, not of my right mind, smiling into the distance. Cali Ziegler was capable of anything, and so was I, along with all the other uberous women who’d been walking the earth for thousands of years.
Less than a year after Ryan resolved Joseph Michalik’s mistreatment of animals case, police responded to an anonymous tip that would lead Ryan down a familiar path. An emaciated pit bull was frozen to the sidewalk a block from our house on Hazel Street. Necropsy reports showed the puppy died from systemic multi-organ failure, secondary to severe malnutrition. Rocco looked more like a premature fawn or an aborted fetus than a puppy, his rib cage accentuated by his thin fur coat. He was all bones, no meat. One of his back digits dangled from a sinewy thread, bloody and raw, and his haunches were mottled with the markings of his own feces.
Through the anonymous tip, police were able to trace Rocco to his owner, Brandon Fredrickson, and Brandon’s girlfriend, Alyssa Brandt, who were living in complete squalor: dirty dishes growing mold, feces-stained sheets, McDonald’s drive-thru bags and crushed soda cups, soiled clothes, and an empty box for a First Response pregnancy test—by all accounts, Brandt’s urine having conjured up two pink lines. In a cloudy green fish tank, police discerned the webbed feet of a pet turtle, and in addition to an empty dog crate, too small for Rocco, police discovered another pup named Princess, not nearly as emaciated as Rocco but edging in that direction. The day after Fredrickson’s case appeared in the Northwestern, Ryan called me at work and said, “Well, I’m defending the dog killer’s girlfriend.”
“Another animal cruelty case?”
“Yup. Another one.”
I imagined myself connected to
