“If you want to swing by or something,” he said, nearly asphyxiating on emotion, “that would be cool.”
The ambiguity of the quiet old lady in Goodnight Moon is also the story’s magic. We are bewitched by the matriarchal rabbit, rocking back and forth across the orange and green pages. This book was first published in 1947, the year my mom was born, such that it has endured the test of time, seven long decades.
Maybe the old lady in the antique mustard-colored rocking chair, knitting with green yarn, is my own mom, or maybe she’s yours. In the form of a rabbit, that quiet old lady might be all mothers, maybe even me—but if she is, I am not whispering “hush” to my children. I’m shushing myself. Goodnight Mama. It’s time we lay that starry-eyed, fullest-moon phase of your life to rest.
On my return to the Milwaukee clinic, the rain was formidable, descending upon Highway 41 in liquiform curtains. When thunderstorms rev up to seventy miles per hour, windshields are whited out. The downpour generated a great blinding hole, a void I’d known only in blizzards. So many cars had stowed themselves away beneath overpasses that no room remained for me. The torrent had not subsided as I continued to seek an oasis, but when I finally exited at a rest station, the rain slowed with me. As I decelerated, so did the velocity of the raindrops, reminiscent of some lesson I’d learned junior year in physics.
Was this the sign I’d been seeking? On the wayside of Highway 41, was I fated to look at myself in the rearview mirror? I could easily have turned my compass north back toward Oshkosh. I called Ryan on the phone, and he said, “You can turn around.” But I didn’t. Feeling more alone than I’d felt in what seemed like a lifetime, I continued along my forward trajectory. Limbo was not a place I could afford to reside.
I felt apprehensive, skittish. I worried about the so-called nut jobs. Today might be their day to plant a bomb, so the clinic, its providers, and all the patients would burst into flame. In middle school, I’d read about the supposed phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, long having imagined my burning flesh. What would I smell like, melting to ash, if murdered by zealots at the tables of damnation? We’d be heaped together, a momentous human pyre, covered on the evening news. Inside, I paid the receptionist $550—dirty money for a dirty cause—in cash, then stepped to a side window to receive my paper cup filled with lukewarm water. To my right, a young woman paid for hers using her father’s credit card. “Just pop that pill,” the attendant said. As I swigged the doxycycline, to prevent the unlikely event of infection, I felt like Susanna in Girl Interrupted, being monitored so as not to hide my antipsychotic. Upstairs, in the site for medical procedures, I was the only woman alone, so I grabbed Shape magazine and read about new trends in exercise such as “puppy Pilates” till they called me.
A nurse named Tia guided me into an examination room. “You gonna be all right,” she kept saying, a mantra or a hymn. She laid me back, guiding my legs into a tent, making overtures toward the ceiling tiles with her hands and soft voice. Postcards from the founding doctor’s extensive travels were pasted in neat rows—Bali, the Serengeti, Bangladesh, Ireland, Mexico—photos seemingly ripped from books of fairy tales. She held my hand, and I wrung hers, my only lifeline. When the doctor arrived, I began to tremble. In this lonely world, McNally had paid for Ryan, and I for Tia, in some cockeyed economy of moral support.
“Remember,” I said, “I’d like to see the egg afterward.” Not a problem, she reassured me, warmer and more gentle upstairs, in clinic, than she’d been in counseling mode, days earlier. When she numbed and levered open my cervix, wide enough for the vacuum tube, I’d reached some threatening final frontier. I was no victim; I was strong and self-possessed enough to call it off, but as with labor and delivery, I closed my eyes, and breathed long and deep, drawing strength from all the women who’d lain there before me—thousands of them, waiting for their bodies to be penetrated by some man-made machine.
I expected to hear the vacuum’s roar, but instead I heard slurping, like jelly being suctioned from a jar. Tia kept counting down but then would start the clock over. The procedure lasted four to five minutes, after a three-minute promise. I didn’t feel pain so much as waves of agony, my insides deflating, like maybe I was an inflatable woman, after all. When the doctor left the room with my petri dish, I called out, “Can you bring that back?”
Needing something tangible, even corporeal, I sat upright too fast and nearly vomited, just as she emerged again, through the scrubs-colored curtain. I should have been relieved rather than disappointed. My pregnancy looked like nothing—one speck of blood, scant fluid, and a corroded-looking egg the size of caviar, or rather, like a single Skittle Gustav had sucked to its soft candy core before depositing it in my palm.
The state of Texas had recently approved new rules requiring abortion providers to properly bury fetal remains, separate from other biomedical waste—just one of many efforts to sabotage abortion rights. Mothers, of course, buried their placentas, postpartum, under trees to celebrate closure or to call blessings upon their families. What would happen, I wondered, if I buried that egg, nearly dissolved though it was, in my yard? If this were