After all that time in rehab, eight months or more, how desperate must Jacobson have been for a fix? What kind of drugs did he procure and shoot up—crush, snort, ingest—between his escape and his apprehension the following day? And was it worth the additional years of incarceration he might now face? Did he pop some slow-release tablets, the chemicals still coursing through his veins when he pleaded guilty to the charge of escape?
Before I conceived and lost baby June, how close had I come to being rehabilitated myself, to giving up my addiction to pregnancy, and was it safe to say Ryan and I were now right back where we’d started? Conceiving a fifth baby, despite the loss, confirmed what I already knew. Every time I counted the kids—Irelyn, Leo, Fern, and Francis—to ensure they were safe, I’d feel an uninhabited and unnamed void. For the first time in my childbearing life, my body had failed me. But now I knew a fifth baby was exactly what I wanted and needed, my grand finale, one final star-spangled season of rapture.
CHAPTER 9:
Ultrasonic
Patience is a heavenly virtue but certainly not one of mine. To cope with my miscarriage, I categorized my bleeding as menstruation and began to calculate when I’d ovulate next. One month of summer remained, and if I could convince Ryan to release his genetic code on the day of ovulation, I might officially be pregnant again by our last-hurrah summer trip to Door County. Within nine months, I was determined to be cradling evidence of our sex in my arms. I wanted to catch “the birds and the bees” and hold their buzzing but delicate wings between my hands, inoculating me against the onset of sadness.
We’d need to love quietly and covertly, the intimate parts of our bodies deciphering each other, without speaking. Lovemaking and parenting in tandem had altered our sex rituals. When Irelyn was still little, she would wake us in the morning and say, “Your sheets smell like wet grass.” Over the years, identical voices would call out ambiguously from the darkness in the midst of our trysts—“Mama,” spoken like a question, as if I might be gone. We’d be half-dressed, under the sheets, listening for the flutter of footsteps. But now that I’d revived my mission for a fifth baby, I worried less about being caught in the act by our children and more that the pressure to conceive would paralyze Ryan into choosing celibacy over sex. What’s the old joke: children are their own form of birth control?
They say before the uterus bears babies, it’s the size of a small pear, but postpartum, it never returns to its original dimensions, one of many ways in which women are never the same after childbirth. We’re like old houses in which the wood is warped by the load of its inhabitants. Even in the throes of lovemaking, my bones seemed to emit a low-pitched hum. During the month of August, Ryan and I copulated once to the murmuring of my body, which I hoped was enough, even though my midwife had downplayed the chances of conception this quickly after miscarriage, as my body needed to recalibrate. I had used this biological unlikelihood to seduce Ryan.
But why else was he willing to climb into bed and make love without a net? I’ve wondered in hindsight. Maybe he saw that unprotected sex was staving off my depression. He vividly remembered my volatile and explosive side, the woman I was pre-motherhood. Although he loved me then, he preferred me now, mellowed out on hormones. He must have considered the trade-off: a few more years of an enchanted existence with his otherwise moody and never-satisfied spouse in exchange for a fifth baby.
When we arrived at our rented cottage in Ephraim right across from the kids’ favorite beach, warm and shallow for hundreds of yards, Ryan was proud to unlock the door. Wasn’t the location specifically what I’d requested? In previous summers, we’d stayed farther north on the peninsula, but I’d strongly hinted about wanting to stay in a more central hot spot. The kids galloped across the sloping floors and darted between the three bedrooms, jumping on the springy mattresses.
Everything was bare-bones, including the indoor-outdoor brown carpeting and the glorified card table in the kitchen. I felt gravely and unexpectedly disappointed. The cottage smelled like cigarette smoke and mold, nothing like the maple-syrup scent of my own childhood cottage on Rainbow Lake. I sat down in an ugly gray chair as the kids escaped into the yard, and I began to cry.
Since becoming a mother, I had cried very little. Even upon learning of the miscarriage, I carried the grief like heavy rocks in my stomach as opposed to releasing sadness in the waterworks. But now, stuck in the mind-set of wanting a nest egg, I could not bear the thought of sleeping in a dump even for a few days. I knew how selfish and ridiculous I was acting, but in the moment, I could not help but feel sorry for myself.
“Oh, honey,” Ryan said. He was laughing again but wounded too. “I tried. I’m always trying.” I was crossing my fingers, looking for omens that I would not menstruate, while Ryan was rooting—half-joking, half-serious—that I’d be able to join him in a celebratory drink as soon as I began bleeding.
There was nothing like taking four small children on vacation to remind us how noisy, chaotic, and unpredictable our lives were. We warned the kids we’d be expelled from Door County for a public disturbance. Between the squabbling, teasing, laughing, whining, complaining,
