“What did you grab the fucking wheel for?” Price was yelling.
Krumenauer was not answering. Eyewitnesses called 911 immediately, then converged on the scene and found Krumenauer sitting in the grass, holding Delilah. Both were alive but dazed, bleeding but not profusely. Later that day, when an accident reconstruction expert showed up, long after the victims of the “accident” were transported to separate hospitals, he discovered strands of Autumn Krumenauer’s hair stuck to the sharp edges of the popped-out windshield. By the time paramedics arrived, Delilah, whose forehead was gashed and swollen, had fallen asleep in her mother’s arms. Although she survived the accident, she’d be rushed to the hospital for a thorough examination and would miss her own fourth birthday party.
Flowers meant for her grandmother lay scattered nearby in the field. When Francis was little, he loved to pick dandelions or daisies from our garden. “Mama had a baby, and her head popped off,” he’d sing, then laugh uproariously. Beheading flowers, imagining my head flung into the dirt, never got old for my son. Mother’s Day would forever be such a combination of wickedness and joy.
Packed tight like little cured meats into our saltbox house, a family of seven in barely 1,700 square feet, we began to indulge fantasies of moving in spring 2015, a few weeks after Reginald Price skyrocketed from County FF, nearly killing his passengers. Gustav’s “room” in the closet was repurposed for storage again, and our tape measure stopped lying. On the kids’ last day of school in June, Ryan and I drove hopefully around neighborhoods on the other side of town, a Sunday drive on a Tuesday. Ryan’s work in criminal defense had fully drained us both, and he hated our Hazel Street house like it was a living, breathing entity.
Irie had attended a charter school for fifth grade, free at long last from our neighborhood school, and we’d applied for Leo to do the same. Fern remained baffled by her school life, as her first-grade teacher routinely ran from the classroom in fits of tears, horror-struck and dumbfounded by the kids. When Leo intercepted a football at recess, a kid stomped on his rib cage until he was bruised but not broken—common practice. With Francis and Gustav queued to join these ranks, we dreaded the next decade. Irie, Leo, and Fern referred to their alma mater, that two-story brick schoolhouse, like it was Alcatraz.
We knew the main barrier to moving would be conquering our credit score. Ryan met with the quirky mortgage broker in his building. He examined our situation and assured us we could secure a loan, so by midsummer, we decided to spend every penny on moving. A realtor pounded a deep hole into our front yard, and two days later, plugged it with a For Sale sign. Every time I’d turn the corner onto Hazel Street, I’d get heartburn.
The years between Gustav’s birth and his second birthday in 2015 were as sacred as all the other two-year waiting periods between babies. Wet diapers, the polypropylene and orange-scented wood pulp soaked with urine, smelled good to me. Baby saliva and snot were salves I relied on. I loved the way Gustav’s fists stayed clenched and how blue threads twined behind his closed eyelids when he slept. I would breastfeed him longer than any of my other babies, until well after his fourth birthday, marveling that my ducts still filled and released milk.
“This is our last one, I promise,” I’d say to everyone we met. No baby gifts, showers, or blessings on a fifth baby. Instead, I was expected to offer assurances to family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. “We’re done after this—really, truly.” Here he is: our last baby. Ta-da!
When people I’d never met learned of my five children, they’d ask my race or nationality, “because around here the only families with that many kids are Hmong.” When one of Ryan’s clients learned about our five children, she looked him straight in the eye and said, “All from the same baby mama?”
Strangers assumed we’d amassed them with multiple births. They’d say, “Do you have triplets or something?” For a time, Francis caught up with Fern in terms of size, and we called them “the twins,” which fit perfectly the narrative others crafted. For a while, families we knew casually through the YMCA wondered if we were a blended family. One mother was shocked to learn that ours was not a second marriage. Irie once cried about lying to a friend who wanted to know what church we attended because “big families are always religious.” She told her St. Raphael, the biannual site of her piano recitals. But we had absolutely no intent to deliver our children into some larger stereotype or social movement. We were most likely to describe them as our citadel, protecting me from suicide and the sieges of sadness, as they buoyed my spirits and fortified my desire to live.
By this, my fifth child, I thought I might possibly let go a little easier, but as McNally said, an addict is always an addict. Fortunately, that summer, Ryan and I experienced such an intense pileup of stressful surprises that for the first time in my childbearing life, I came suddenly to my own conclusion that five babies had to be enough.
The first eye-opener came in the form of a phone call. I was on campus, grading quizzes from Women in Literature, during an intensive three-week semester, teaching three
