by Jim Nelson
On her fourth visit, Dr. Wynn told her, “It’ll happen in the coming week.”
“It feels like she wants to leave,” Hanna said.
“You’ll be assigned lighter work chores from here on,” he said. “No more walks in the trees. Keep off your feet, plenty of rest, don’t exert yourself. Understood?”
Hanna nodded. She loved walking among the trees and regretted losing that duty—a privilege, in her mind.
“You need to start taking these.” Dr. Wynn handed her an orange prescription bottle. “One with each meal. You’ll run out before I see you again.”
Hanna recognized the name of the drug, gefyraprogestagen. More drugs. “Will this make me fat?” she said, recalling the last time she saw Cheryl Vannberg.
“You’ll gain weight,” Dr. Wynn said.
“What are they for?”
“All the girls take them when it’s time,” he said. “One with each meal.”
Hanna, sour, placed them in the pocket of her bridge daughter dress. At least tell me what they’re for, she thought.
“Some of the girls here,” Dr. Wynn said absently, “they like to write letters to their loved ones. Or draw pictures if they can’t write. Can you write? Well, I suggest you start tonight then. If you’re inclined.”
“Who should I write to?” Hanna asked.
“Who you want to say goodbye to,” he said. “Your parents. You have friends at home?”
Nurse Halper smelled of whiskey again, the way some people smell of mouthwash. “Tell her about writing to the baby,” she said to Dr. Wynn.
“Right,” Dr. Wynn said. “Some of the girls here write to their gemellius. They call it ‘writing a letter to yourself.’ Of course, it’s not. You share nothing with the gemellius other than biology.”
“Your baby won’t remember you or anything you’ve done,” Nurse Halper said. “It’s not like in the movies.”
*
Hanna sat on her bed with a writing pad and a ballpoint pen. She started three different letters to her parents, all unsatisfactory, all accusing in tone. Hanna decided the time for grinding axes had passed.
She tried writing a letter to her father, but did not feel particularly drawn to tell him anything but “I love you,” and even that statement felt forced. She wanted to know why he stood behind her for so long in the kitchen that one night. She wondered if he wanted to say or do something to Hanna, but couldn’t bear to carry through with it.
She addressed one letter to her mother. Her words of love were flaccid and forced too, and she grew accusatory in just a few sentences. You worked so hard to avoid growing attached to me, she wrote. You forgot I was your child too.
She abandoned it and wrote a new letter to her mother. I could have had a bi-graft. I’m doing this for you and Dad. I would have hated myself either way. So here. You win.
Her letter to herself, her letter to the gemellius within her, she stared at the blank page for a minute before scribbling, This is all your fault.
Around her, bridge daughters comforted their wenschkinds and rocked them asleep. Hanna pulled her suitcase out from under her bed. Her wenschkind was folded up inside like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Hanna cradled it, rocked it in her arms, pressed it to her chest. Nothing. Annoyed, she yanked down the top of her nightgown. She pressed the ready mouth of the wenschkind to her right nipple and mashed its head to make it suckle. Nothing. How foolish. Little Hanna—big Hanna. She felt nothing and she felt everything, and she felt it all at once.
*
Eloise shook her awake. Through the window Hanna saw it was well before dawn.
“It’s time,” Eloise whispered to her.
“Kitchen again?” Hanna said, groggy.
“Your parents are outside,” Eloise whispered. “Don’t worry about your things. I’ll take care of everything.”
Hanna, belly swollen like never before, swung her feet around to sit up in bed. Still in her night clothes, she slipped on her bridge daughter shoes and, with Eloise’s assistance, rose to her feet. The predicted weight gain had set in. The added pounds on her neck and thighs made navigating in and out of bed that much more difficult. From under her pillow Hanna took a paper crane. She slipped it in a small pocket of her night dress. The girls of Cabin Two slumbered on.
“You have letters?” Eloise whispered.
Hanna shook her head. The night before, alone and the camp songs long over, she’d tossed all her false starts in the pit’s dying fire. Take nothing, leave nothing behind. The letters curled in the flames to gray char.
Twenty-five
In the cold dark of the compound’s central area stood Hanna’s parents, Uncle Rick, and Aunt Azami. All were bundled up, the women hugging themselves to stay warm. They beamed as Hanna emerged from the cabin, but Eloise prevented a joyful greeting with a shush and a warning not to waken the other girls. Hanna’s mother had brought a long wool coat, lavender with square yellow buttons. She put it over Hanna’s nightgown. It smelled of Ma Cynthia, her farmhouse beet pies and the fruit preserves on shelves in the moldy basement. The smell recalled the crescent-bladed knife mounted on the wall over the kitchen table, and the horseflies hovering over the garden compost pile like vultures.
“This was your grandmother’s,” Hanna’s mother whispered. “I thought you might like to wear it.”
“Fits well,” Aunt Azami added, tugging at the collar to straighten it out.
“I’m fat now,” Hanna whispered.
“You look fine,” her father said.
The group walked across the compound toward the clinic. Eloise led the way with a sweeping flashlight.
The interior of the clinic was flooded with fluorescent light. The adults stripped off their jackets. Hanna kept hers on. Eloise told them to wait for the nurse and wandered back into the nighttime.
“Hey, squirt,” Uncle Rick said, now free to talk without whispering. He rubbed her hair. She fell into him and hugged him deeply. “Missed you too,” he said.
“We’ve all missed you,” her father said.
“Have you?” Hanna said.
“How are you feeling?” her mother said.
Hanna shrugged. “Nothing to report.” Her mother seemed hurt when Hanna said it. That surprised her, but she felt no need to apologize or ask what she’d done.
Nurse Halper met them wearing a crisp white nurse’s uniform and a white smock. “We’re ready for you now.” She led them to an empty waiting room. Hanna had not seen this wing of the clinic before. All her examinations took place on the far side of the building. Two windowless doors were on the waiting room’s far wall, one marked A, the other B.
“Dr. Wynn will be with you in about twenty minutes,” Nurse Halper said, and she left through door A.
“I thought they were ready for us,” Hanna’s father said.
“I think there’s another girl,” Aunt Azami said, nodding toward room A. “I saw her and her family walk in when we were parking the car.”
That must be Kendall, Hanna thought, a green-ribbon girl from Cabin One also on the pills Dr. Wynn prescribed. Hanna noticed her taking them with her meals.
Hanna sat in a chair, almost motionless. She was surprised at how tranquil she felt. Aunt Azami couldn’t stop looking at Hanna, one hand tightly clutching Uncle Rick’s. Hanna’s father remained standing, as was his wont, hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets.
Hanna’s mother started straightening Hanna’s hair with her fingers. She’d not combed it since rising from bed. She asked Hanna how camp was going so far, as though she was only halfway through her time at Susanna Glen.
“Lot of walks in the woods,” Hanna said. “Every night we have campfire songs.”
“Kumbaya and granola?” Uncle Rick said jokingly.
“Did you make any friends?” Hanna’s mother said.
“Two,” Hanna said. “No, wait. Three. But they’re dead now.”
Uncle Rick winced at that. Aunt Azami’s eyes widened. Hanna’s mother seemed unaffected.
“They make you pray?” Hanna’s mother said.
“Just campfire songs,” Hanna said.
“Make you read the Bible?” Uncle Rick asked.
“Just campfire songs.”
“What did they teach you?” Hanna’s mother asked.
Hanna jerked her head from her mother. She was tugging her fingers through a snag. “I’ll fix it,” Hanna said, and she went to the bathroom out in the hallway.
It was cramped, a toilet and a square sink and a mirror. She cupped water from the tap and poured water into her hair. Unevenly wet, she combed her fingers through it until the cowlicks were tamed and the amber bangs hung more or less down. She tugged two paper towels from the dispenser and padded her hands and face dry.
The bathroom’s sole window was narrow and frosted. It opened with a hand crank and had been cracked to let in air. Through the slit Hanna could see the rear of the clinic. Although far from sunrise, wispy morning light was filtering through the Pacific mist. The pale violet delivery van was there, the van that looked oddly like a small garbage truck. It was parked backwards with its double doors toward the clinic. Rex leaned against the hood of the van, his back to Hanna. He smoked and drank steaming coffee from a ceramic mug, reveling in the valley below of kingly redwoods standing like giant chess pieces.
Aunt Azami hugged Hanna when she returned. “Your mother said you personally wanted me and Rick here,” she said. “Thank you.”
Hanna had demanded it. Although she had little bargaining power when she returned home from her second escape to San Francisco, she insisted Uncle Rick and Aunt Azami be invited to her finality. When her mother refused—convinced Azami had seeded the idea of a bi-graft in Hanna’s mind—Hanna insinuated that she could do damage to herself and the gemellius, even at a controlled environment like Susanna Glen. Hanna’s mother didn’t believe the threat at first, but Hanna’s bitter seriousness made her accede.
Hanna held out the paper crane she’d taken from under her pillow. “I finished the last of them here at camp.” Hanna turned it over, showing Azami the number 1000 inked on its underside.
“I knew you could do it,” Aunt Azami said.
“Do what?” Hanna’s father said.
“Did you make your wish?” Aunt Azami said.
“Yes, and I got it,” she said. “I wished for you and Uncle Rick to be here.”
Aunt Azami, shaking her head and eyes watering, hugged Hanna again. Uncle Rick reached over from his chair and squeezed the back of Hanna’s neck. His eyes were veiny and red too.
Outside, a truck engine turned over and coughed to life. Metal began grinding and hydraulics began churning. If the adults heard it, they took no note.
Nurse Halper emerged from door A. “It’s time.”
What would Maureen do? Maureen would bravely power forward. Hanna had committed to finishing this. Now it’s time.
But something about the motor and the churning piqued her. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, rising from her chair.
“We’ll be right here,” Nurse Halper said. She didn’t smell like whiskey this morning.
In the bathroom, door locked, Hanna peeked through the slit of the open window. Rex was gone now. The van’s rear doors were open. From its rattling exhaust pipe she knew its engine was running and the churning told her the rear lift was being operated. Hanna tugged on the frosted window’s hand crank to widen her view, but it was stuck. She pushed hard, putting her weight into it, even setting a foot against the toilet seat, but it would not budge.
Time running out, she scrambled around the bathroom for a lever or degreaser—anything that would give her an advantage over the damned crank. She considered pounding the crank with the butt of her hand but feared the noise would bring the adults. She had to see what was going on back there.
Hanna ran hot water in the sink. Cupped hand burning, she poured handfuls on the crank hoping the water would seep into its workings and loosen them. Success—a moment later she had the window open as wide as it would go. Standing on the toilet seat, she could’ve squeezed through the aperture and out to the great redwood pillars, then plunged headlong into the mist and lush growth. Four and a half miles to the ocean. She could make it.
The hunchbacked van was backed up to a loading door marked A. Rex operated the hydraulic lift with one hand, cigarette in his mouth. His other hand guided into the van a hospital gurney draped end to end with a lumpy white sheet.
Kendall, Hanna thought. The only fair thing in the world is to learn how unfair it really is.
*
Laying on a gurney of her own, staring up at the ceiling of delivery room B, feet in stirrups once more, Hanna took deep breaths while Dr. Wynn searched the surface of her swollen belly with the metal button of his stethoscope. Hanna’s parents hovered in the rear of the delivery room, Hanna’s mother’s arm hooked around her father’s midsection. Uncle Rick and Aunt Azami stood apart from them and not as tightly embraced. Not too long before, Hanna would have been aghast at the idea of her father and Uncle Rick seeing her privates. Today it seemed unremarkable. Hanna had learned to abandon shame.
Aunt Azami murmured to Uncle Rick she had forgotten something in the car. She hurried from the delivery room. Soon she returned with a bouquet of asters and African violets, a bold purple wash of colors exploding like fireworks. The stems were neatly tied with a purple ribbon. She placed them in a small glass vase she’d also brought from the car. With Dr. Wynn’s permission she set them on the table beside Hanna. When Hanna craned her neck she could admire them, but only from afar.
“Everything is exactly as hoped for,” Dr. Wynn announced. He produced a hypodermic with a frighteningly long needle, tube already loaded with a liquid, and without warning injected it into Hanna’s side. Trussed up, her egg-shaped belly slathered with disinfecting gel, Hanna felt like a turkey being basted by Dr. Wynn.
“I’m not having contractions,” Hanna called up to the ceiling. She remembered that detail from Mother & Baby. Its chalk drawings depicted the father holding the mother’s hand in the delivery room. He breathed and counted along with her while her womb convulsed out their bridge daughter. “When do they start?”
“Hanna,” Dr. Wynn said from between her legs, peering over his horn-rimmed glasses, “we haven’t done a natural pons childbirth since Truman lost China. This will be a cesarean.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Hanna said to the ceiling.
Hanna’s face began to feel rubbery, then her neck and arms. Lolling her head about, the room spun and blurred. She took a deep breath to regain herself. She wanted clarity all the way to the end. She wanted to know what was happening each step of the way.
“We’re ready,” she heard Dr. Wynn say. A burning line seared under her navel. She instinctively reached for it. Nurse Halper had restrained her wrists and arms to the gurney with straps made of the same material as car safety belts. She gasped but could not hear her voice. What would Maureen do? She couldn’t answer that question now.
“And I see her,” she heard Dr. Wynn say. “Healthy and sound.” Hanna craned her head to look. Dr. Wynn’s hands were plunged inside her body as though searching a tightly-packed suitcase. She so wanted to see the gemellius she’d carried within her for almost fourteen years now, but it remained hidden.
A slap sounded and the baby began crying. “Nurse, if you would,” she heard Dr. Wynn say. Hanna scanned the ceiling for any clue. “And now, the funicular cerebrum—“
Uncle Rick turned his back. Aunt Azami hugged him tightly.
Everything went black. Too dark for an electrical outage. Emptiness, a void.
“I can’t see,” Hanna heard herself say.
“That’s the severing of the funicular,” she heard Dr. Wynn say. “It’s perfectly normal.”
Over the infant’s crying she heard her parents saying She’s so beautiful and Isn’t she precious? and baby-talk. Steel medical instruments were set on trays with clangs and tinkles. Carts of equipment were w
heeled way. A hard clamping fist pinched together the flaps of her deflated belly. Due to the massive local Dr. Wynn had pumped into her abdomen, Hanna could not feel his final medical duties, a quick run of sutures stitched across her gaping belly. They sealed Hanna’s innards and prevented them from slopping out while her corpse was in transit down the mountain. “We’re done here,” she heard Dr. Wynn say.
Hanna writhed against the straps. The nurse pushed the gurney head-first through swinging double doors and out of the delivery room, leaving the doting parents with their new baby daughter. In the finality room, Nurse Halper locked the gurney’s wheels and disconnected the IV from Hanna’s arm. “Only a minute or two now,” she said to Hanna who, mouth gaping and blank eyes searching for light, thrashed and tossed about.
Dr. Wynn washed up at the hands-free sink in the corner. Hanna’s parents cooed and cradled the swaddled infant. The nurse emerged from the finality room to rejoin the others. Before the swinging doors behind her could close, Uncle Rick stepped in her path. He held a clipboard and pen.
“I’m supposed to be witnessing this,” he said. “I’m kind of lost with the paperwork.” Rick used his height and girth as a barrier between the nurse and Azami behind him. “I was hoping you could help me fill out this section?”
The nurse leaned in to assist Rick. On lithe feet, Azami slipped unseen around his mass and through the swinging doors before they shut.
In the dim finality room, Azami crept to the gurney and leaned to Hanna’s ear. “These are for you,” she whispered. She pushed the bouquet to Hanna’s nose.
The feathery butterflies of the flower petals danced against her cheeks and lips. Their strong, overpowering perfume filled Hanna’s nostrils and sang to her. She inhaled and inhaled, determined for their fragrant symphony to be her final aspiration.
Heady and joyous, Hanna relented. The thousandth tsuru, crushed, dropped from her now-limp hand. It rolled headlong across the floor and under a cabinet, where it came to live among the dust there.
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