(follow the route to st. jude’s you’ll see my car before you see me)
The worm of disquiet had babies. An unease that was almost painful filled her chest. The spit in her mouth was thick, almost choking.
But what the fuck could she do?
“Hey, Kevin,” she called, hating every word she said, “just talked to your mum. Grab your stuff, we’re going to meet her.”
She had to close her eyes as she said this.
The letters to Lisa and Nick began the same way:
This won’t answer all your questions, but I can’t help that. All I can do is explain what I want and how I want it and hope you trust me enough to understand and do it.
Kevin’s letter began differently:
I’m sorry for what you’ve seen, honey. You have no idea how much I wish you hadn’t.
She checked for opposing traffic and of course there wasn’t any. She put on her turn signal out of force of habit and pulled over, trying to leave room for Lisa’s car when she got here.
Her purse sat on the passenger seat, the three letters sticking out of the open top. She pulled them out and flipped through them. She resisted opening them and reading them, knowing she would think of other things to say, or better ways to say it, and she wasn’t going to do that. This was her final say in the matter.
This was her example, as best as she could put it.
The interior of the car grew stifling. She shut the engine off and opened the door. She had to squeeze around the BRIDGE CLOSED sign PennDOT had put at the mouth of the lane.
… there are ways a person can go through life, her letter to Kevin continued, that allows them to ignore the pain they’ll feel, but, in the end, it doesn’t make anything better. In the end, it just makes things worse. When you close yourself off, when you deny the things you feel, you’re hurting yourself just as much as if you cut yourself. That’s no way to go through life.
Your mother has had a hard year, but one thing it’s shown me is that I’ve been hurting myself for a long time and, because I’m your mother, I’ve also been hurting you. As a mother, there’s nothing that makes me feel worse than the idea that I have done anything to harm you …
Lisa slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a minivan that had come to a dead stop just past the Squirrel Hill Tunnel.
“Goddamn cocksucker!” she screamed at the minivan’s flashing brake lights. As if in response, they went out and the minivan rumbled forward. Lisa tried not to ride its ass and failed miserably.
“Sorry,” she said to Kevin. “Potty mouth.”
“S’okay,” he said. He watched the lunch rush hour around him, cars and trucks filling the Parkway, stopping and starting and drag-assing along. “You’re better at swearing than Mum is.”
“A badge of honor,” she said, distractedly. She’d made excellent time getting into town—the benefit of going in the opposite way of most lunchtime traffic—but now that she was edging in, she was stuck in the push-pull. She willed the cars to go forward and they stubbornly ignored her. Her head beat out a simple thought: Karen, Karen, Karen, Karen, Karen. What was she doing? What was she going to do?
She saw her exit coming up, the detour leading to Harmarville, and she cut off a school bus to get to it.
You never noticed it when driving across, but renovation was something that the Hathaway Bridge desperately needed. It seemed the lanes were more hot patch than actual concrete. The walkways were crumbled, revealing rusted rebar. The concrete handrail had the softened edges of decay and crumbled beneath her hand in places.
She walked far enough out so that the Hathaway skyline, gleaming in the noon sun, looked like a postcard. Beneath, in the Buchanan River, barges trundled through the gray water, but nothing else.
Her hand crept to the letters in her back pocket.
… For a long time, I ignored or denied I wasn’t in pain and all it did was hurt me more. That ended up hurting other people.
I can’t hurt you anymore. I won’t allow it.
“That’s Mum’s car,” Kevin said.
Lisa’s eyes had been glued to the road ahead. When Kevin spoke, her head snapped up and her Toyota swerved a little.
Karen’s Sundance was parked in the mouth of the Hathaway Bridge, the side nearly touching the BRIDGE CLOSED sign.
“Jesus Christ,” Lisa panted, and out of the corner of her eye Kevin’s head snapped around. She winced and glanced at him.
She saw no surprise on the boy’s face.
Oh, kiddo, she thought and didn’t know if she was speaking of Kevin or Karen.
She pulled in so that the noses of the two cars almost touched, and killed the engine. “Kevin—” she started to say, but Kevin had already unbuckled and was climbing out of the car. She scrambled to follow, nearly falling out onto the road.
What a fucking Polish fire drill this is, she thought and ran around the car. Kevin was already on the bridge, walking up the center lane.
Karen stood by the bridge railing, watching them, and Lisa’s panic exploded: “Karen!”
She started running. Kevin ran, too.
You’re going to be hurt, honey. More than you ever have and maybe more than you ever will.
Don’t run from it. Talk about it with your dad, or Moira, or Lisa. They can’t take away your pain, your loss, but they can be a sympathetic ear for you, to allow you to feel your pain.
I’m sorry for having done this to you. I’m sorry more than you can say. I did exactly what I’m telling you not to do and spent too much time trying to escape from it.
Learn from this. Learn that ignoring how I felt made me sick, until I knew I couldn’t get better, no matter how much I talked. I had bottled it up, ignored it for too long, until everything hurt, even the good things.
I hope you choose better than I did. I hope you choose today to do better than I did.
She watched them come running and surprised herself by starting to cry. A weight she hadn’t known had been there suddenly rolled off her chest. And now if she could just do this one thing right …
“Karen!” Lisa screamed. “Don’t you fucking move!”
She held up a hand and the two skidded to a stop a dozen or so yards away, as if she repelled them. Both stared at her, eyes eating up their faces, panting.
“What’re you doing?” Lisa asked.
Tears rolled down Karen’s cheeks. The breeze turned them immediately cold. “The only thing I can,” she said and her voice cracked.
“Your son is right here! ” Lisa yelled.
Karen nodded. “I know.” She hunkered down and opened her arms. “Come here, hon.”
Kevin pelted for her, threw himself into her arms like a footballer going for a tackle, hugging her fiercely. She gripped him just as tightly back, breathing in the scent of him, the feel of him panting and shaking.
(my boy oh honey)
Kevin said something into her neck. “What?” she asked and tried to look at him. He gripped her harder, but turned his head slightly. “Don’t,” he said and his voice was all snot.
She closed her eyes and kissed his head and held him.
Lisa watched the two hug and hold, Karen straining to keep her balance, and felt a moment’s hope—maybe this was just a scare. Maybe Karen was proving something—to who and for what, Lisa didn’t fucking know, but it didn’t fucking matter. Karen was ill, but not too ill, and this entire fucking morning could be a story later on about how Karen went to the edge, but chose to step back.
She watched Karen talk to Kevin, whispering, and felt this hope … and then she saw Karen reluctantly let go and stand up, even as Kevin tried to pull her back down. She gripped his hands, squeezed them, and pulled them off of her.
“It’s okay,” she told him and Lisa’s heart wrenched.
Karen let go of one of Kevin’s hands and pulled something from her back pocket. “Give these to Lisa for me,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Don’t believe her! Lisa wanted to scream, but the air had completely
left her chest.
Kevin backed away, slowly, not turning away from his mother as if to do so would rush what was about to happen. Karen watched him back away, watched as he bumped into Lisa and she gripped him and he blindly handed her what turned out to be three envelopes, each addressed to either Nick or Lisa or Kevin.
“Don’t lose those,” Karen said. “They’re important.”
Too many words bubbled up to be spoken; all Lisa could manage was: “Stop this now, Karen!”
“I’m setting an example,” Karen said, and wiped her eyes. “You have to read the letters, though. You have to.”
Kevin shook against Lisa, vibrating like a dog hearing a thunderstorm. Lisa tore open the top letter with shaking hands, only looking away from Karen when she pulled out the thick sheaf of folded legal pages.
Kevin, the letter read, I’m sorry for what you’ve seen, honey. You have no idea how much I wish you hadn’t.
She looked up and Karen was climbing the railing.
RUN! her brain shouted. RUN TO HER GRAB HER STOP HER!
But her legs were locked. Kevin pressed against her.
“He shouldn’t be seeing this!” she screamed at Karen.
Karen stood on the railing. “He has to. So he doesn’t end up here himself. I know this.” She swayed with the breeze and Lisa felt Kevin go board-stiff.
Karen held her balance and looked at Kevin. “I love you, honey. Don’t ever do this escape. Don’t ever want to escape. Don’t be me.”
And, before Lisa could think of anything to say, Karen stepped off the railing.
In the years to come, when the letter his mother had written him would yellow, the folds beginning to crumble, that instant would never leave him. During times of stress, he would close his eyes and hear Lisa’s scream, feel her shake behind him with the force of it, see his mother step off the Hathaway Bridge.
But he would invariably open his eyes—if the memory occurred to him at night, it would halt any possibility of sleep—on the last thing he saw; a single frame, as if it were a movie.
His mother’s face as she stepped off the bridge.
His mother, smiling as she fell.
All That
You Leave Behind
“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”
– Author Unknown
Week 21, Third Trimester
Carrie came home to a house with a heartbeat, walls throbbing and windows rattling.
She stopped in the entryway, counting Mississippis, the floor vibrating beneath her feet. The th-thump-th-thump reverberated down the stairwell, opening up into the entryway and the living room beyond.
At twenty-one Mississippis, the heartbeat transformed into a baffled sshhhh-pop, and then resumed.
She hung her keys on the hook beside the door and dropped her shoulder-bag, heavy with material for an article, hard onto the floor.
The recording upstairs didn’t stop.
She walked into the kitchen, not trying to soften her footsteps across the hardwood. She flicked on the overhead kitchen light and went loudly through the cabinets. A Tupperware container of meatloaf on the top shelf of the refrigerator looked the least moldy. She pulled it out and slammed the fridge door hard enough for it to open again.
Now the recording upstairs paused. Carrie waited in the center of the kitchen, Tupperware in one hand, plate in the other.
She thought she heard the desk chair creak.
She waited some more.
When Danny didn’t call down, she fixed herself food she no longer wanted and sat down at the kitchen table. Mail was strewn across the surface. Not indicative that Danny had gone to work today, but at least he’d left the house.
She ate mechanically, riffling through the circulars, the bills. She didn’t look down the hall, where the kitchen light would hit the corners of the closest boxes marked BABY CLOTHES or BABY BEDDING in her spiky shorthand in the living room entryway. A list of everything was already in the tax folder upstairs, also written in her shorthand. Danny had never gotten around to it.
At the twenty-first week, the fetus has eyebrows and nails.
When she finished, feeling more bloated than filled, she dropped the dishes into the sink, briefly ran the faucet, and dumped the meatloaf, container and all, into the garbage can beneath.
Another chair-creak upstairs, but no floor creaks. Danny was merely adjusting his position.
At the twenty-first week, the fetus is more active; the movements you thought you felt during the previous month become apparent. You already know this, but the realization that something is alive inside you becomes more pronounced.
She started up the stairs. Guest bathroom at the top, door closed, hallway to the left. At the sixteenth week, the fetus’s bowels begin collecting meconium, a tarry kind of proto-poop. That had been Danny’s term for it. Hysterical at the time.
Door on the left was the guest bedroom-slash-office, painted a gender-neutral green during the twelfth week. A fetus’s gender doesn’t form until around the twenty-fourth week. Evelyn if it’d been a girl. Ethan if it’d been a boy.
Danny sat at the small desk, head buried in his crossed arms on the desktop, turned away from her, tin can headphones on his head. On the computer, Windows Media Player was up, playing the forty-five-second-long file. The pieces of the crib that Danny hadn’t taken out of the room yet leaned against the opposite wall. The single bed that had used to be in here was still in the basement.
At the twenty-first week, the fetus is a half-foot long, weighs nearly a pound.
The crib was for later, after the basinet.
Danny’s shoulders shook, minute twitches, and Carrie raised her hand, as if to touch him. But she stood in the doorway, almost ten feet away, and she wouldn’t enter this room. Not unless she absolutely had to.
She continued to the master bedroom.
Television on the dresser tuned to CNN and Anderson Cooper’s strangely symmetrical face, work clothes shoved in the hamper. The basinet was already gone, removed three weeks ago. She’d been the one to remove it.
She couldn’t avoid looking at herself in the shower, even when she had the water set to scalding and the bathroom fogged. The stretchmarks along her hips seemed even more pronounced then, like accusatory slashes on her body. She scrubbed these areas raw.
At least her nipples had finally lightened back to roughly their natural color. The vertical line on her lower belly had faded away.
Her hands found it, anyway. Pressed against it for a moment.
Carrie had only felt movement once, early one morning during the sixteenth week. She’d rolled to wake Danny up, but it had stopped before she could touch her husband.
Her face grew momentarily hot. She took a deep breath and went back to scrubbing.
Much, much later, she was still awake, turned away and facing where the basinet would’ve been, when Danny finally shuffled through the dark to bed. The mattress settled and shifted as Danny laid down. Before, he would rub the spot between her shoulder blades, a silent good night whenever he came to bed late and thought she was asleep.
Now, she waited, but his breathing slowed and lengthened far on his side of the bed.
She didn’t roll to him.
She listened to him breathe, and, eyes wide, stared at the empty space in the dark.
Week 25, Third Trimester
Before becoming pregnant, the alarm on her smartphone was enough to wake her up. During the pregnancy, continual morning sickness was her internal clock. Commonly, sickness lasts between the sixth and fourteenth week, though in rare cases it goes longer. She was sick the entire length of her pregnancy.
Now, consciousness came slowly, grudgingly, like it was something dragged from the embedded silt of a murky riverbed. All three of the alarms on her phone weren’t enough to wake her up. Danny often had to shake her.
This morning, it was sunlight from the bedroom window that brought her around.
During the twenty-fourth week, the fetus is on a regular sl
eep schedule.
“Danny?” she croaked. Christ, it sounded like she hadn’t spoken in weeks.
Squinting, she rolled over, towards her husband’s side of the bed, guided more by feel than sight. Rumpled blankets. The bedsheet was cool.
She cracked one open eye wider. “Danny?”
No answer. That hum in your ear when only emptiness and silence were your only company.
She flopped onto her back. Danny wasn’t home. Right. It was Saturday and he had … a thing.
Carrie rubbed her face, as if that would make the answer come.
Nothing.
“Pregnancy brain,” or “Mommy brain,” are common symptoms in women. Increased levels of estrogen and progesterone are noted within the brain, heightening the sense of forgetfulness that comes with body-stress and lack of sleep.
“I’m not pregnant,” she said.
She shook herself and sat up in bed, looking around. The bedroom had two windows, plenty of natural light, and it was like she’d never seen it before. The past few weeks, everything had seemed so goddamned gray.
“But was that in my head or for real?” She shook her head and looked down.
Her hands cradled her still-flat stomach, fingers splayed.
“Goddammit!” she yelled and launched from the bed, nearly falling when the sheets tangled around her ankles. She kicked and spat at them until she was free, then stood beside the bed, heart thrum-ming.
She swallowed. “This,” she said, then closed her mouth.
Deep breath. “This is getting ridiculous.”
For a moment, her face crumpled like paper, her eyes hot stones in their sockets. She ground her teeth together and her face smoothed.
Her husband was gone for the day. He had told her where—she knew this—but couldn’t remember and, further, couldn’t even remember the fucking conversation where it had been mentioned. She couldn’t remember the last time her and Danny had exchanged just a few words. More than a month since the
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