But on the drive to Milwaukee, he was calm, humming to himself, and I could feel my husband closer emotionally to me than earlier in the summer. He reached for my hand, and somehow, we reinvented electricity. To what did I owe this pleasure: my husband suddenly, surprisingly, more lover than lawyer? I remembered that defense attorneys, by judicial design, are losers, no matter how cogent and emphatic their arguments. This was a man accustomed to defeat. Most of his clients served time. That was just the way criminal defense worked. To his credit, he never once argued a fifth baby wouldn’t make me happy, and that day, having accepted his fate, he allowed me the unforeseen gift of basking in motherhood.
We ate lunch at a patisserie in Wauwatosa and shopped at a specialty boutique, where Ryan insisted on buying me two dresses. One was gingham with ruffled sleeves and flowing lines; we imagined I could wear it until my third trimester. At the register, I found a pair of thumbnail-size earrings embossed with the image of the Madonna and child, which he purchased so I could wear them to the lakefront, where we swayed together, a man with his lady, about to embark on advanced maternal age. I could still dance and sing out loud. Growing this surprise baby was as nostalgic for me as listening to “Kick Drum Heart” would be a decade later.
The air at Summerfest smelled of beer and dead Lake Michigan fish, but knowing I was pregnant was like wearing rose-colored glasses. Everything looked pretty, even the polluted walkways, as I remembered what I loved about early pregnancy, always a secret, hidden away in a specialized pocket. It’s the pumpkin seed you’ve planted that has not yet sprouted. It’s the poem you’ve memorized but never recited out loud. We made love twice, before the concert and again in the morning, and I readapted to the mysteriousness of sex, my baby and my husband inside me at the same time. Ryan seemed resigned but accepting, less fearful of a fifth baby in practice than in theory, ready to adapt with me.
When we returned home to Oshkosh, we didn’t tell the kids about the pregnancy, but they must have noticed I was higher than usual, floating through summer in a helium-filled balloon. Whenever I was pregnant again, parenting seemed, at least for a short honeymoon period, to be easier. Maybe my capacity for love was expanding but not yet filled, or maybe, because babies are blank slates, mothers can’t help but feel inspired. They are brand-new, never-scribbled-in notebooks with lily-white pages; they are new houses to inhabit. We’d probably need one of those too, if we could ever afford it.
Although I was expecting to feel tired, instead I felt like I’d swallowed some uppers. Soldiers during World War II were given crystal meth so they’d stay up all night and avoid death by surprise in the trenches. This new baby galvanized me against the grueling task of nurturing four children through the heinous July heat. I counted their heads on bike rides, adding an invisible fifth. A neighbor boy accompanied us on outings to the library and the pool, and I pretended he was mine.
Two weeks later, when Ryan and I got away for dinner at an Italian bistro in Appleton for our wedding anniversary, we asked for a hidden table, where we huddled close on our iPhones, searching for early twentieth-century gender-neutral baby names. Fern had been born exactly a century after my dad’s mom; we called them “the ’08 girls,” a lovely coincidence that ultimately made us superstitious about numbers and the passage of time.
We ordered Benedictine cheese with bread and Whistleberry Farm’s pork chop with apple marmellata and smoked bacon jam. We had conceived this baby in June, a month named for the Roman goddess of fertility, so we would christen number five “June,” a boy’s name back in 1912, exactly a century before he’d arrive. If our June were a boy, he’d be the third in our Ulrich trifecta: Leo-Franco-Juno. I was about seven weeks along, and I’d scheduled an appointment with my midwife, the same who’d delivered Fern and Francis.
The summer continued to rage hot, and a draught had turned the grass brown, but as far as my eye could see, our landscape was brimming with color and life. When a mother-to-be is pregnant, she is never alone. Throughout the month of July, June remained inside me. I didn’t need champagne or lyricism to feel buzzed. Then, for the third time in a month, Ryan and I were on a date at a wedding. Our fifth baby was with us but not yet a third wheel. He or she was quiet, discreet, and without the power yet to interrupt our conversations.
The bathroom off the lobby was narrow and dark, and I needed to adjust my eyes inside the dark stall. When I finally hoisted up my dress and sat down, I could feel that my urine was clotted. I spread my legs to look between them, and that’s when I saw the thick brocade of bloody mucous. I wiped several times, hopeful to be imagining my period, having a flashback to an earlier month or year. Each time I pressed down with tissue, more blood appeared. I felt very little cramping, which baffled me, as I realized, right then and there, I was bleeding out a baby without any contractions. I felt suddenly stupid and naive, the embarrassment of having secretly celebrated just one emotion, in a string of them, meant to ward off instantaneous grief.
I didn’t want to return to my seat. I didn’t want to feast on love and marriage. I didn’t want to dance or eat or applaud or tap a fork against my crystal glass. When I found Ryan, I whispered into his ear, “I’m bleeding,” and although the blood was plentiful, I pretended
