Bridge Daughter

by Jim Nelson

  Hanna squirmed. “Erica has to do a lot of stuff around the house.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to do all that stuff.”

  “I bet you don’t,” Hanna’s mother said. “Did you see her room?”

  “She doesn’t have any books,” Hanna said. Coloring books don’t count.

  “She probably can’t read,” Hanna’s mother said. “Or she can only read little children’s books and food labels.”

  “But she can count,” Hanna said.

  “Counting’s important when you’re tending to the house and the larder. Does she have a wenschkind?”

  Hanna, confused, shook her head.

  “That’s a baby doll they give bridge daughters,” her mother explained. “They’ll probably give her one on her thirteenth birthday. Very traditional. It’s for bridge daughters who want to know what it’s like to hold the baby inside them. Do you want one?”

  Hanna shook her head.

  Her mother spoke carefully now. “I’m now going to do something very distasteful. The Grimonds do it to Erica every week. I don’t like doing this, Hanna, but I will do it.”

  Her mother rose from the table and instructed Hanna to follow. They filed down the hall to Hanna’s bedroom. Her mother instructed Hanna to stand in the doorway and remain still and quiet. Then, Hanna aghast, her mother began opening every drawer in her dresser and rifling through her clothes. She pressed each article of clothing between her fingers, searching for hidden pockets and anything sewn into the seams. She ran her hands up under the lid of the drawer for secreted items. She replaced the clothes as she finished searching them, folding them back up if necessary. Hanna kept a tidy room, at least her mother was not disrupting that.

  “What are you looking for?” Hanna said.

  “Quiet please,” her mother said.

  Once completed with the dresser, her mother went to work on Hanna’s bed. Pillow cases were removed and felt through, just like the clothes, and the pillows themselves were squished to discover anything that may be sewn into them. The covers and sheets were stripped and checked. Her mother swept an arm between the mattress and box spring. Hanna had confessed to that hiding spot months earlier and no longer considered it a safe place for illicit goods.

  She had nothing to hide, though. The pregnancy test had been thrown out, and her copy of Mother & Baby was now openly stored in her bookcase, as she’d confessed to buying it with her mother’s money. She received no punishment for it, but future infractions would not be so easily forgiven. She had nothing to hide, Hanna reasoned, but it alarmed her watching her mother search her room so wantonly and without discretion or apology.

  “Help me make the bed,” she told Hanna, and Hanna obliged. Once finished, she told Hanna to return to the doorway.

  The bookcase was next, then her closet. Her mother retrieved a stepladder and flashlight from the kitchen so she could search the top shelf of the closet, where old toys and clothes were stored. Hanna’s alarm faded with each new location rooted through. She told herself that this was the new reality. She was living far better than Erica, who was housed with dry dog food and boxes of All Temper-Cheer.

  Mind wandering, she didn’t realize until too late that her mother was flipping through the pages of her ledger, the register of every origami crane she’d folded to date.

  “Where did you get this?” Hanna’s mother held it out to Hanna. “I don’t recall buying this for you.” Hanna, wide-eyed, took too long to answer, her mouth dry from surprised guilt.

  “I got that a long time ago,” she stumbled. “From Uncle Rick.”

  “He never gave you this,” Hanna’s mother said. “I would have remembered. Tell me the truth.”

  Hanna hung her head. Her face felt hot. Can’t be soft anymore, she thought. What would Maureen do? Have to be strong now.

  “I took it from Mr. Cullers,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Hanna’s mother nodded to herself, looking about the room. “How many of these cranes have you made?”

  Hanna pointed to the notebook. “I think I’m up to six hundred and twenty.”

  “And where’d you get this?” Hanna’s mother held up an unopened packet of origami paper.

  “Aunt Azami gave that to me! In San Francisco. For real!” It was the truth.

  Hanna’s mother went about the room, tapping the spine of the notebook against her fingers. The only items she’d not searched were the origami cranes themselves, hundreds of them, a paper sea of sharp lines and colorful patterns. They filled the window sill, the top of the dresser, and the back half of Hanna’s writing desk. Her mother took a random one from the sill and considered it.

  “I’m tempted to throw all of these out,” she said to Hanna.

  “No!” Hanna crossed the room and wrung her hands together. “Please stop doing this!”

  “I’m worried you could hide money in them,” her mother said. “Maybe you already are.”

  “I’m not!” Hanna took one from the desk and unwrapped it as fast as she would a candy bar. “There’s nothing inside.”

  Her mother took the unfolded crane from her. “Why do you number them?”

  “I want to make a thousand,” Hanna said.

  “A thousand?” Hanna’s mother took in the sheer number of cranes again. Hanna had never revealed her project, fearing her mother would learn about the thousand cranes’ attendant wish. “No, you’re not keeping a thousand of these things here. Why a thousand, of all things? This has gone on too far.”

  Hanna pressed her hands tighter. “Don’t! Please!”

  She took Hanna by the upper arm. “Go back to the door,” she said. “Stand there until I’m finished.”

  The earth was slipping out from under Hanna, a complete loss of control. When would this tectonic rumbling end? Her mother, so patient with her when homeschooling, firm but willing to listen, was now resolute in changing every assumption Hanna held, right down to the simple idea she could fold a thousand tsuru without needing to ask permission.

  “You can throw them away,” she told her mother, remaining at her side. “But let me keep making them.”

  “You don’t mind me putting them in the trash?”

  “I just want to fold a thousand of them,” Hanna said, “then I’ll stop.”

  After a moment of consideration, Hanna’s mother said, “I’m not going to take your books, although I should. I’ll let you make your flower arrangements from time to time. But I don’t like the clutter.”

  Hanna’s mother lay the unfolded crane and the pocket notebook on Hanna’s desk.

  “I won’t throw your cranes away,” she said to Hanna. “You worked too hard. But I’m going to put some of these in a grocery bag and store them in the garage. When you finish a thousand, we’ll talk about what we’ll do with them all.”

  Hanna, drained from panicking, now felt warm gratitude filling in its place. She told her mother thank you, and she meant it.

  “I’m going to search your room once a week,” she told Hanna. “Now go wash your hands. You need to start dinner.”

  Sixteen

  Wiping a dust rag across the dining room table, Hanna felt something inside her fighting to get out. At week thirty-six of her pons anno, her belly was like a volleyball pressed up against her pink skin. The pressure came again—a soundless thump, the baby in her punching to get free. Hanna made a noise of surprise and staggered to a high-backed chair for support.

  Her father rose from his easy chair and approached with both hands out. “Hanna?” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s moving,” she said.

  “Dian,” her father called out, “we need you in here.”

  Her father watched on, all but helpless, until Hanna’s mother arrived and inspected her. “It’s kicking is all,” she told them both. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “It’s going to keep doing this?” Hanna said.

  “It might,” her mother said. “You sure did, all the way to the
end.”

  Hanna took deep breaths and massaged her belly until she felt she could stand straight again. It seemed she could do nothing without the thing inside her fighting back.

  *

  After drawing blood at the clinic’s lab, Hanna and her parents ate lunch in the first floor deli, a Ruben for her father and the soup-and-half-sandwich special for her mother. Hanna took sullen bites from her plain hamburger, no cheese, no dressing, no vegetables. Food had lost its taste. Even the pleasure of ice cream had abandoned her. She was gaining weight, too, and not just about her midsection. Her wrists and ankles and knees had swollen up. Her old comfortable jeans would not zip up, even if she sucked in her gut.

  Not that she wore her old clothes any longer. Hanna’s mother took her clothes shopping the day they returned from San Francisco, and as she gained weight, they shopped again for larger sizes. They no longer visited the Misses section of the department stores. Instead, they went to the back corner of the stores’ basements, a few unattended racks of frumpy dresses and soft-soled shoes. The mannequins about the section were girls Hanna’s height frozen in various stages of pons anno. A sign of all-capital lettering hung over the dressing rooms: BRIDGE. Hanna had seen this section in the upscale department stores too. Those establishments tastefully labeled the section Passerelle in cursive script, even though she didn’t understand what that word meant. In those stores, the racks were stocked with frillier dresses and bonnets and flat leather shoes with decorative buckles across their tops.

  Hanna’s father took one of the French fries from her plate and popped it in his mouth with a playful smile. Before, Hanna would have protested playfully in return, but that morning she didn’t care. Eat them all. Starchy carbohydrates, bland ketchup, mealy hamburger meat, rubbery bun. More blood drawn from her right arm, the puncture hole gauzed and sore. More test results told in confidence to her mother, more instructions on what vitamins to take and what activities to avoid. More of the astringent odor of Dr. Mayhew’s perpetually-sanitized examination room, more of the crunching sound the waxy paper on the table made when Hanna climbed on it. And more of Dr. Mayhew’s prodding and manhandling and peeking inside her.

  “Do you like the flowers?” Hanna’s father asked her. He motioned to the two carnations standing in a plastic vase beside the shakers and coffee sugar.

  “They’re fake,” Hanna said.

  “Really?” He reached over and rubbed a petal between his fingers. “I’ll be.”

  *

  The examination completed, Hanna requested her father turn his back while she slipped out of the hospital gown and into her bridge daughter dress. Today she wore a lavender frock, its corded neckline close about her throat and its hemline well past her knees. The soft flat slip-ons were not designed for running across lawns or through puddles, or running at all. That would be the point, Hanna reasoned. Her mother helped her with the dress, smoothing out creases and ensuring it was square on her body.

  “Everything is textbook,” Dr. Mayhew announced. “Hanna has definitely reached ponte amplio. The final twelve weeks of gestation,” she added for Hanna’s benefit. She opened Hanna’s folder and scanned down a page. “Dian told me on the phone you’d changed your minds?” Dr. Mayhew said to Hanna’s parents. “You would like to know the gender of the gemellius after all?” Dr. Mayhew added for Hanna, “That means your double. The baby.”

  On their way to the clinic that morning, Hanna wondered why her father had come along. Now she realized his attendance was to hear the baby’s gender first-hand. He never came to Dr. Mayhew’s before.

  “We had a change of heart,” Hanna’s mother said to Dr. Mayhew, looking to Hanna’s father for a nod of agreement.

  “Is this because of San Francisco?” Hanna said, but her parents ignored the question.

  Dr. Mayhew double-checked the results before her. Smiling, she announced, “You won’t need to paint the room.”

  While her parents embraced, a spout of bile rose up within Hanna. Saved of the trouble of a coat a paint, her bedroom was prepped and ready for another little girl, one who happened to look exactly like her. She would inherit Hanna’s books and blankets and clothes, even her tsuru. And her parents were so pleased.

  “Are you going to call her Hanna?” Hanna said sarcastically.

  “Hanna,” her mother said, “do not start.”

  “Little Hanna to replace the old worn-out useless Hanna.”

  “Listen to your mother,” her father said.

  “What were you going to name him if he was a boy?” she said. “Harry? Harold?” She searched for more boys’ names starting with H, but bitterness robbed her of her imagination.

  “We would have named him after your father’s father,” her mother said calmly. “Armand.”

  Hanna never knew Grandpa Driscoll’s given name. “Dumb name,” she muttered.

  “Young lady—“

  Hanna’s father touched his wife’s shoulder. “I think Dr. Mayhew has something she wants to tell us.”

  Dr. Mayhew had watched the back-and-forth from afar. “Ah, yes. I’m recommending Hanna begin taking gefyridol.” She continued talking while filling out a prescription. “It’s merely a precaution.”

  Hanna, stewing, said, “More pills?” Dr. Mayhew had put her on a multivitamin regimen at week twenty-four, adding two dietary supplements eight weeks after that.

  “I thought everything was textbook,” her father said.

  Dr. Mayhew said, “The bridge daughter who carried Dian had Hoff’s Syndrome. It carries from bridge daughter to bridge daughter. It rarely leads to complications, but they’re preventable. Actually, I’m surprised the bridge who carried you wasn’t prescribed gefyridol.”

  “My mother believed in home remedies and homeopathic cures,” Hanna’s mother said dryly.

  Dr. Mayhew tore the prescription from the pad and handed it to Hanna’s mother. “Gefyridol is injected subcutaneously. There’s a cream, but it’s not covered by your insurance and fairly expensive.”

  “Shots?” her father said before Hanna could exclaim the same.

  “Twice a week,” Dr. Mayhew said. “Have you given her injections before? No? All right, I’ll give her one now, just to show you.” Sensing the room tense up, Dr. Mayhew smiled broadly for all of them. “Really, it’s easy.”

  Dr. Mayhew took a slender cardboard box from a glass-fronted cabinet and broke its seal. From it she removed a flimsy plastic tray securing three vials. She demonstrated to Hanna’s father how to sanitize the vial’s rubber stopper with an alcohol swab. Then she unwrapped a disposable syringe and plunged its needle through the stopper and into the magenta-colored liquid. She tipped everything upside-down and withdrew one cc, showing Hanna’s father the proper way to measure. Hanna’s hands were gripped tight around the seat’s frame.

  “I hate needles,” Hanna’s father said to Dr. Mayhew, flushed.

  “You get used to it,” Dr. Mayhew said. “Hanna, please come over here.”

  “No,” she said.

  “It won’t hurt,” Dr. Mayhew said.

  The needle looked long enough to go through her leg and squirt the liquid out the other side. “I’m not doing it.”

  “How much does the cream cost?” her father said.

  “You said it’s not necessary,” Hanna said to Dr. Mayhew. “Why do I have to take it if it’s not necessary?”

  “It’s to ensure the safety of the child,” Dr. Mayhew said.

  “I don’t care,” Hanna said eyeing the needle. A drop of purplish liquid hung from its tip.

  “It’ll be over in five seconds—“

  “I don’t care about little Hanna! What about me?“

  “Hanna!” her mother snapped. Her gaunt face was Puritanical. “Come over here this instant.”

  Hanna hung her head and squirmed down in the chair, fingernails digging into the bottom of the seat cushion.

  “Now,” her mother said.

  What would Maureen do? Hanna shook her head once, defiant.<
br />
  Hanna’s mother strode two long steps across the examination room and smacked Hanna across the left side of her head. Hanna reeled crying out, feet coming off the floor. Her hands had gone up to protect herself, and without support the force almost knocked her from the chair. She cradled her head and stared up into her mother’s granite, determined face.

  There could be no crying now. It was more than being strong. She carried her mother’s child. She’d consciously known that for months now, but here in the examination room, head ringing, the fullness of that statement revealed itself to her. She had to quit thinking of herself as her mother’s child. She’d stopped being her mother’s child when pons anno began.

  No, Hanna thought, the bite of the slap seeping across her face, I never was her child. I’m the soil around the seed.

  Her mother took the needle from her stunned father. “I’ll do it,” she said.

  What would Maureen do? Be strong. Hanna rose and shuffled to the examination table.

  “Just remain standing,” Dr. Mayhew told her, as uneasy as Hanna’s father. “I should’ve had you keep the gown on, but this will do.”

  Dr. Mayhew instructed Hanna to pull up her bridge dress. No longer caring what her father saw, she gathered its hem and bunched it below her nipples. She had thought—no, hoped—her breasts would develop as the mother’s breasts did in Mother & Baby, but hers remained stubbornly flat throughout pons anno. Another aspect of evolution’s genetic gamble, another dimension to God’s plan for the human race: Mothers breastfeed bridge daughters but the gemellius receives all the nourishment it needs from the bridge daughter in utero. Little Hanna would be born ready for pureed apples and carrot-pea mush.

  Standing as she would in public—chin level, eyes out straight—Hanna waited with her dress up and panties revealed. Behind her, Dr. Mayhew instructing, Hanna’s mother discarded the syringe’s drawing needle into a sharps container, capped it with a thinner injection needle from its own sterilized package, and tapped the syringe to remove any air bubbles.

  Then Dr. Mayhew advised her mother on the best places to insert the needle. Two sets of hands tugged and squeezed and stretched taut the skin on her lower back and upper buttocks. A firm hand pinched a roll of fat from the weight developing on her hips. A moist toilette sterilized a patch of the roll. The prick of the needle arrived followed by a cold flush spreading across her lower back. She did not feel the needle removed. The ripping of paper sounded behind her, a Band-Aid package being torn open, and a hand smoothed the bandage over the sore, frigid spot.