Neither of us spoke before falling asleep. It wasn’t until two days later, while we were drinking our first cups of coffee, that Ryan said, “Who’s going to be the first to mention our liaison the other night?” I would have danced across the worn wooden floorboards if our kitchen were big enough.
A day before I was due to menstruate, I left campus early and returned to our messy house. It was Friday afternoon, our weekday housekeeping energy long since depleted. Children’s Nutella-stained T-shirts and dirty balled-up socks were bundled with blankets and stuffed animals in piles on the couch. Half-eaten bagels with petrified cream cheese lay discarded on end tables. A baby doll was facedown on the back of the toilet. Bald plastic heads attached to soft, forsaken torsos—on cutting boards in the kitchen and in carpeted corners—reminded me of my brother’s year-round efforts at running a haunted house for other neighbor kids. His favorite accoutrement was a hanged baby that shared a rope with a hatchet, strung from the pipes in our childhood basement. Babies, and their various forms of demise, had long been programmed into my brain.
This time, when I peed on the pregnancy test, I set it upright on the bathroom counter and walked away for a minute. When I returned, the pink lines were darker than on the last test. They did not appear erasable. I called Ryan on the phone to tell him, and he was surprised I’d taken the test so early, without warning him first.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Complete,” I said, and I sat still for a while, calculating my due date—another May baby. Gratefully, I could again avert having to request maternity leave. Although I’d learned through a small whisper network of academic moms that I could also petition for a “pause” of my tenure clock, I’d long since been discouraged from demanding my rights. By May 2016, the university’s Family Policy Action Group would make a formal recommendation to UW Oshkosh for more fair and civilized family leave policies and practices, but even by baby number five, I was still three years ahead of my time. Alone on Hazel Street that September day in 2012, tapping a little e.p.t. ditty against my palm, I was too happy to be mad, already drifting into the dreamscape of pregnancy, wondering how long I’d have to wait to feel the metal button of life stitched to my insides.
Brenda Lund’s attorney advised her to plead NGI—not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, the insanity defense. Her trial was postponed so that she could be rightfully examined by psychiatric professionals. My dad was one of two psychiatrists who testified at her trial.
During jury selection, attorneys asked panelists about their attitudes on abortion, childbirth, postpartum depression, and premarital sex, running the gamut of nerves they’d hit as they unveiled the tragic story of how Brenda Lund murdered her baby. The prosecution and defense selected a jury of ten women, many of them mothers, and only two men. Was Brenda Lund fully aware of the wrongfulness of her actions when she plunged a pair of scissors through her baby’s skull? Did she realize she had killed her baby as she lumbered down the basement steps to hide the bruised and gouged body? Where was her first daughter, now a toddler, on the day of the crime, and would seeing her mother, in the hospital or behind bars, have scared her?
Fern once returned home from my dad’s house giddy on tales of Lizzie Borden. My dad and my stepmom had recently returned from a tour of the Lizzie Borden crime scene in Fall River, Massachusetts. Nancy had photographed my dad lounging gruesomely on the divan in the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, the exact coordinates where Andrew Borden was discovered bludgeoned to death. I helped Fern find videos about Lizzie Borden with documentary voice-overs of pigtailed girls jumping rope to the well-known rhyme, skirts flouncing and grainy on the screen. Fern memorized the words:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.
We read about the bloodstained dress that Borden burned to hide her crime, or so historians believe. I caught Fern studying the folds of her own dress, decoding secrets revealed in the ketchup stain or the dirty flocked hem. Then, in the middle of the night, Fern sidled against my pillow and raked my hair with her tiny hands.
“Mom,” she whispered, her voice granular but soft like a flurry of talc, “I’m afraid Lizzie Borden’s ghost is going to use my body to kill you and Dad.” Streetlights illuminated the bedroom and Fern’s Miss Spider sleeping bag on our floor. I held her hand for a sleepy minute, dismissed her worries, and muttered some variation of “You need to sleep.” Fern seemed the least likely of our children to perpetrate a violent crime, but was she? Could anybody determine our penchant for madness from the outside looking in?
“Brenda Lund does not look like your typical criminal,” the DA argued to the jury during her trial for the murder of her baby. “A lot of people feel that when someone like Brenda does something like this, she had to be crazy, and that’s not necessarily true.”
But my dad, in his role as Dr. Ralph Baker, believed she was inherently good. He would have resuscitated her old nicknames if he possessed such power—little old “Granny Brenda.” Along with a colleague from Milwaukee, he testified that Brenda Lund suffered from dissociative disorder at the time of her baby’s birth. His medical opinion was she had detached involuntarily from her awareness and actions, behaving in ways entirely inconsistent with her value system. The physical stress of birth had even caused short-term amnesia. Brenda Lund, he testified before the jury, was not competent at the time of her crime and therefore could not be held criminally responsible.
In my world, my dad was
