From the cavernous lobby of the banquet hall, I called the answering service at our hospital, and one of our midwives called me back. She said I should come in the morning to have my hCG levels tested to determine viability. She was an especially religious midwife, and although we did not share that in common, I felt comforted when she mentioned God because I wanted to share this loss with somebody else who might, conceivably, be in on the secret.
Whereas Rob McNally had creative control over his meth lab, messy and toxic as it was, my body was its own chemist. I could not force my baby to adhere to my womb. My body had a mind of its own. Between my first hCG test in the morning and a follow-up one three days later, I kept thinking there must be something I could do to help the egg thrive. What if I rested more than usual or remained horizontal—self-imposed bed rest, forcing the blood not to drain? What if I prayed to God or the gods? Whenever I found a spare moment, I’d read blogs about women whose successful pregnancies were riddled early on with heavy spotting. If a criminal like Rob McNally could cook up his fix with a few items from Walmart in his girlfriend’s garage, why couldn’t I work my own magic to keep a baby from sliding out of me?
My pregnancy hormones were supposed to double every three days. Although I suspected my numbers were dwindling, as I was still bleeding and feeling neither nauseated nor exhausted, I was still secretly hopeful. Seventy-two hours after the first test, I returned for another numbers check. When my midwife called with results, the upside-down lilt of her voice revealed my miscarriage.
The hCG in my blood had diminished, though traces remained—twenty-nine mlU/ml, in fact. If you look this up online, a calculator will say, “Congrats, you’re pregnant!”
In my case, however, my baby was growing backward, from an embryo back into a zygote. Within a few hours or days, my baby would be just a wasted egg, absorbed into pads and the breaches of my underpants. Some of my baby would be flushed away through pipes beneath our house toward the water-treatment plant, awash in other kinds of waste we speak of only in private. Perhaps I’d jinxed our chances, naming our fifth baby too soon. Worst of all, I feared I’d been presumptuous in asking Juno, goddess of fertility and childbirth, for protection.
Pregnancy and childbirth helped me record time just as sundials helped the Romans. After the miscarriage, Irie was about to embark on her third-grade year at our neighborhood school. She failed to make close friends, and when the principal asked why, Irie said, “All the kids’ parents are drug dealers.” The principal politely admonished me as I tried to explain, “There’s some grain of truth.” Ryan knew more than he wished about other school families.
Our house on Hazel Street, that great albatross, was shrinking in size as our professional burdens intensified. Many mornings, I’d wake at 4:00 AM, pack four lunches, lay out four outfits, line up four sets of winter boots, then head to my office in the dark to grade and prepare for class, leaving Ryan to commandeer the morning. He would work late, and I’d repeat this process in reverse. We lacked the time to air workplace grievances, so we never bothered censoring what little we managed to spit out, over the bows of our ships, passing in the night. All the kids’ parents were not drug dealers, of course, but this was the nutshell version that Irie had gleaned. Like my dad, who censored nothing, I told too many horror stories at home.
Eventually Irie spun the stories thick, telling them to her younger siblings on car rides. She’d point at houses with Confederate flags for curtains and heaping mounds of garbage on dilapidated front porches. “If you’re naughty, we’ll drop you off over there,” she’d say. According to these ever-evolving tales, not as tall as they seemed, parents smoked “ciga-rats” and crushed ashes onto steep landings where children slept without mattresses, the nightmare of free-falling so real they ground their teeth into petrified corn kernels. “You’d better listen, Leo,” Irie warned. Her words emerged slow and muffled like backmasking on old cassette tapes.
When I regretfully volunteered during Irie’s third-grade year to lead a Girl Scout troop, I lasted only two months before quitting, safeguarding my mental health but causing the entire corps to disband. I’d feel uneasy, nauseated even, as I organized activities. One girl’s toothless mother scared me too stiff to function. Was she a meth addict, buying the junk from a guy like McNally, or was she just an impoverished woman without proper health insurance coverage, as I was once? After meetings, the toothless mom smoked cigarettes outside, and I’d wonder, would she grind that butt into some steep landing? The line between truth and fiction was blurry; I preferred simply to close the book. As Ryan increasingly resented his clients, the proximity of our neighbors’ crimes, though real, grew distorted. Sometimes I felt trapped inside a video game, waiting for the most innocuous humanlike cardboard cutouts to detonate.
When our children initiate their own risk-taking—climbing tall, crooked trees; petting pit bulls; attaching ropes to skateboards and pretending to water-ski—my gut instinct is to allow them, but I’ve been taught by Ryan to step in and say, “My job is to keep you safe.” For as grouchy and irritable as Ryan can be, ever beat down by the stress of his job, he possesses the air of a protector. He is Dr. Daddy, the man who held both boys during their ER visits for stitches. He premeditates about safety precautions around the house. Bouncy balls are choking hazards; suckers, sticks, forks—you name it—might impale our children. Although he has gained weight, softening in the middle, his shoulders have remained broad and naturally muscular. He can bench-press two hundred
