Francis’s unusual hyperactivity did little to help. On the second vacation day, he leapt from the bow of our pontoon, sinking underneath, before we killed the motor. By the third day, Gustav refused to wear clothes, even to play mini golf. Our only relief was from the puppy we’d bought as a surprise for the kids—Archibald Moonlight Graham. Archie was a pooch as wild, unruly, and voracious as Gustav, but fortunately relegated to doggie day care during the vacation. Ryan and I fantasized about the upcoming weekend. Both sets of grandparents had agreed to babysit a percentage of our children—the only way they could be managed—so that we could celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary in Madison.
Friday, our first night alone, was day twenty-one of my twenty-eight-day cycle, wasn’t it? Confident, cocksure, verifiably certain—how else might I describe my obliviously unintentional miscalculation? Ryan knew, and I knew, we could not safely raise another baby from scratch, but assuming Friday was the twenty-first and not the fourteenth day, we made love with the kind of freedom reserved for infertile times of the month. In the morning, I ran six miles through the UW–Madison Arboretum, and Ryan biked alongside me, idly chatting, cheerfully nostalgic about his law school days. We even visited the Memorial Union Terrace and walked through the Law School building, fantasizing about our growing independence, as if we were children seeking freedom from our parents, now that Gustav was walking, talking, and blowing bubble gum.
When we finally returned home, our aviation guests had kindly stripped our mattresses to wash our bedding, thereby exposing my menstrual stains, brownish-red stigmata, where I’d leaked, as if opening my veins too many times in the bed. I worried frivolously they’d want a refund for the tainted trundle. Then about ten days later, in that same marriage bed—our wedding gift to each other fifteen years earlier, where we’d conceived all our children—Ryan rolled toward me in a sweat-drenched panic in the blue-black hours of morning, and said, “You’re pregnant.”
Drowsily I reassured him, “No, I’m not. I’m already bleeding.” I wanted to remain in my safe, sleepy existence, and I had been spotting. For two more days, I tried to convince him I was beginning to menstruate, as if I’d been trained to lie, deflect, and deny. Maybe my body was clogged. Bleeding would arrive. The days of August were pliant, putty I could shape and reshape until it suited me, but had I consulted the calendar upon our return, retracked my cycle, and taken a test, I’d have confirmed what three tests told me forty-eight hours later. I was pregnant; I was pregnant; I was pregnant.
Fifty years from now, doctors will probably prescribe “doll therapy” for me, alongside other female residents in assisted living facilities. We’ll swaddle fake babies, round plastic heads peeking out from beneath bundles, and among the grizzled women, veteran mothers, I will rock and sing, comforted beyond the effects of medicine or human interaction. Sometimes in a game of make-believe, I cradle Fern’s baby dolls and pat their backs, feeling silly but comforted. Gustav’s favorite YouTube channel showcases Surprise Egg toy reviews; in a trance, he watches endless unveilings. What surprises are embedded inside? Pregnancy would forever fill me with childlike wonder, and now a test designed by scientists indicated that my empty stomach had been replenished with a magical little novelty.
But when I called Ryan to confirm his suspicions, I felt worried—for him, for me, for us. Since the beginning of time, women have ended pregnancies, and I thought immediately of termination, my only contribution left to this family. What might be a better word—sacrifice or atonement? Evidence exists of abortifacient herbs in ancient Egyptian documents onward—pennyroyal, black cohosh, brewer’s yeast, bitter melon, and tansy. Sometimes women tried to poach their eggs, pry their babies loose, or fall down stairs—what wouldn’t they do? And what would it mean to become part of this legacy, a modern woman at the comet’s end of this astronomical trajectory? “We don’t need to keep it,” I said to Ryan, and for a long time, both of us remained enveloped in that ominously dark pocket of silence.
Fern, Francis, and Gustav were enrolled that day in a summer program, and Irie and Leo were with friends; I was free to drive downtown to see Ryan in person. By the time I’d arrived, he’d conducted his research, having prepared phone numbers of clinics where I could get “the procedure.” No matter what happened, I was the principal, and Ryan was merely the coconspirator. Just as in pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum recovery, I’d have to face the music entirely alone, relinquishing, even, my dormant companion inside. How did I even convince myself to dial those numbers? I told myself, At least get a consultation. You have plenty of time to decide. I wondered about a pseudonym but decided I was not a character caught in the web of my own plot. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, I was palpable, mother incarnate, very real, even if this pregnancy seemed imagined, conjured up by that same godlike warden who’d summoned Ryan and me back to Oshkosh years earlier.
Judges were rarely interested in Ryan’s clients’ stories. Aren’t stories just excuses, anyway, long-winded justifications for the crimes we commit? How would Annie Jungwirth or Lucy Vasquez explain their breaches in protection for their sons, after all? And the Morality Squad didn’t waste time on stories either, so what could I possibly say to them, or to my neighbors and friends? The answer, obviously, was nothing, and so I didn’t. Not a single party to the crime entered our as yet undecided plan, but we talked endlessly, between ourselves, until my brain went blue and numb.
Ryan believed we were doomed by age, especially after the scare over Gustav’s kidneys. Our midwife, who delivered Fern,
