Bloodline

by Jess Lourey

  “Catherine the Migrant Mother,” I murmur.

  “Huh?”

  “Catherine Brody. She lives next door to me. Head of the welcome committee.”

  “Whatever. It seemed intrusive.”

  I take a sip of the Tab. It’s crisp and sweet, perfect for a hot day. “I can see that. Like me getting in trouble for drinking here the other night. People seem to keep an exceptionally close eye on one another here.” I think back to my phone call with Ursula, her scolding me like a child for thinking poorly of Lilydale. “I think it’s part of the charm, though,” I tell Regina, feeling only a twinge of guilt. “Every town has their own culture.”

  She sighs. “Yeah. I suppose you’re right. Except . . .”

  “What?”

  “Have you noticed there’s not a single bum in Lilydale? Railroad tracks run right through it, converge over by the dairy plant, and I’ve yet to see a single person out of place. Everyone here is so perfect and so uptight, like they were all manufactured at the same damn factory. Sometimes I feel out of place, like I might haul off and take a shit on the sidewalk.”

  I belly-laugh at this. “How about we promise to look out for each other. Either one of us feels the need to shit in public, we call the other. Deal?”

  She holds out her hand, her dimples back. “Deal.”

  That evening, Deck and I are sitting on the couch, watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a show that comforts me because I used to watch it with my mom. Deck and I are seated near one another but not touching, Slow Henry curled on my lap, purring loudly. A bowl of pretzels rests nearby on the television tray, and Deck is drinking a beer. It’s cozy.

  Marlin Perkins is visiting the African savanna. He’s talking about springboks, a kind of antelope, smallish, with curved black devil horns. The springboks are notable because they do something called “pronking.” It’s as if they’re drawn into the air by a helium balloon tied to their waist, hopping and then landing, hopping and then landing.

  I’m delighted.

  I’m turning to laugh with Deck about the silly bounce, the springboks leaping twice their height, back arched and toes pointed, when an obviously pregnant springbok appears onscreen, munching grass as her fellow springboks are popping like corn around her.

  “No one knows exactly what events cause springboks to pronk,” Mr. Perkins narrates, “but it’s believed to be a response to a predator.”

  My breath catches. I cradle my stomach.

  The camera pans to a leopard crouched low in the grass, tongue out, tail flicking.

  My hand flies to my mouth. The gravid springbok is oblivious. She’s grazing hungrily, feeding for two. She has no idea she’s being hunted.

  “The weakest animals make the best prey: newborns, the elderly, and in this case, the pregnant.”

  The large cat stalks toward the clueless springbok, her belly achingly swollen. My heart is thudding. I can’t look away.

  “The pregnancy makes the normally agile animal cumbersome and slow. A perfect dinner for a hungry leopard.”

  The large cat is nearly on her. I’ve stopped petting Slow Henry. My eyes feel swollen, dry. It’s been too long since I blinked.

  The cat leaps. It happens so fast. The predator sinks its wicked teeth deep into the pregnant springbok’s leg, wrenching her to the ground. She bleats in terror, tries to run, but she hasn’t a chance.

  I finally rip my gaze away from the screen, tears streaming down my face.

  Deck is staring at me.

  Icy fingers play across my tender skin.

  His expression is unfathomable, but the way he’s positioned, it’s clear he’s been staring at me the whole time.

  Watching me watch the pregnant creature get slaughtered.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Dr. Krause will see you, Miss Harken.”

  When my lower back muscles relax, I realize how rigidly I’ve been sitting. Despite not including Deck’s name anywhere on the intake form, I’ve been worried that I’d be called Mrs. Schmidt, here of all places, a spot where I desperately need to be seen as my own person.

  Clearly, I was silly to obsess. This is a doctor’s office, a professional place of medicine, a neat, sanitary cube of a building that smells like rubbing alcohol and ointment. They may disapprove of me using my maiden name, but they’ll talk about me behind my back rather than to my face, like proper Minnesotans.

  The receptionist, an army bunker of a woman, leads me back. “Please change for the examination. There’s a gown behind the curtain. When you’re finished, push this button to let the doctor know you’re ready.”

  The modern exam room is a pleasant surprise. The surfaces gleam. And I’ve never visited a doctor’s office with a button you can push once you have yourself in order. It doesn’t cure the discomfort of covering my nakedness with a flimsy piece of open-backed cloth, of spreading my legs for a strange man, but it helps.

  As does Dr. Krause’s appearance when he enters the room moments after I press the button. He’s older, his wire-rimmed glasses two perfect circles beneath a shockingly thick swath of white hair. He’s a smaller man, somewhere between Deck and me in size. He carries a clipboard.

  “Miss Harken, I’m Dr. Krause. You’re in a family way?”

  “Hello, Dr. Krause.” My tone is formal to match his. “Yes. I believe I’m five months along.”

  “How are you feeling?” He removes a pen from behind his right ear, poises it above the clipboard.

  “Fine. Great, actually. I was worried about morning sickness, but I haven’t had any.” I recall the panic and nausea I felt the other morning. That doesn’t count, as it started before the pregnancy.

  He looks me up and down, his glance clinical. “You’re in good shape. Let’s get the nurse in here for your vitals.”

  He pushes the same button I did, and the woman who walked me to the exam room returns. Apparently, she’s more than a secretary. I had thought her a large woman, but she seems to shrink around Dr. Krause.

  “Cornelia, you should have weighed and measured Miss Harken before I arrived.”

  She doesn’t meet his eyes. “Sorry, Dr. Krause.”

  “It’s all right,” I say, though I suspect it isn’t, not in Dr. Krause’s eyes. He’s a popular doctor, exactly as the Mothers told Deck (he’d been booked up through the end of the month, but once I gave the receptionist my name, she said she could squeeze me in today), and he runs a tight ship. Coming to the clinic broke the monotony of not being able to track down Paulie—he wasn’t at the motel when I stopped by yesterday or today—but that’s the only good thing I can say about it. I’m no prude, but I don’t know a single woman who enjoys gynecological exams.

  Cornelia leads me to a wall with a measuring tape painted onto it and gently pushes me against it. “Five foot six,” she tells the doctor. She then guides me to the scale. “One hundred twenty-one pounds.”

  I smile on the inside. I’ve gained only two pounds in five months.

  When the nurse leads me back on the table, she takes my blood pressure and checks my pulse. All of it consumes no more than three minutes, and then she disappears.

  “I apologize,” Dr. Krause says. “She’s new.”

  “It’s all right,” I repeat. I mean it. I also want him to hurry up and get the examination over with.

  But rather than having me lie back and insert my feet into the stirrups, he walks over and feels my forehead, and then my neck. “You’ve been sleeping all right?”

  “Yes,” I say, stopping just short of adding the “sir” that wanted to line up like a good soldier at the end. “I’ve been sleeping like a lumberjack after a hard day’s work. I’ve always been a good sleeper.”

  Dr. Krause grabs both my hands, turns them palms up, then palms down. He’s so near I can smell his aftershave, soapy and spicy. He runs one warm hand up the outside of my right arm, and then my left.

  He stops, studying my upper left arm. “This is an unusual erythema multiforme scar,” he murmurs, almos
t as an afterthought.

  I glance at the spot. “My smallpox vaccination?”

  “Yes. Almost like a figure eight.”

  I rub it, brushing his hand away. “My mom said I had a bad reaction. My boy—my boyfriend, Deck, has one just like it. We sometimes joke it’s what brought us together.” I consider telling him the stories we made up around our matching scars—that we’d escaped an alternate world where everyone was marked and then found each other in this one, that the scar was proof of our royal lineage, or my favorite, that our ragged figure eights mean we are a fated, perfect match.

  I don’t think Dr. Krause would find any of them amusing.

  “You two are the same age?”

  “Deck’s four years younger.” It’s an embarrassing fact I rarely think about, certainly never mention. He’s so mature for his age.

  “Then it’s not a bad lot. That happens sometimes. A tainted batch of vaccines goes out, affecting a whole group of children. Four years is too long a span, however.” He clicks his pen. “The Minnesota Department of Health is sending a medical crew through the state. Their primary aim is to collect blood samples in each community, but they’re recording disease immunity, too. You may want to mention the scar you share with the father of your child.”

  I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less, other than this exam. “Thanks for the recommendation. I do have to be at work, though, so if you don’t mind.”

  Dr. Krause’s eyes narrow behind his glasses. I shrink from his anger as the nurse did. “How many hours are you working?”

  “Not many,” I say truthfully. Dennis requested that I phone the Gazette offices before noon every weekday to find out if there’s more articles for me to write or more information on Paulie. There hadn’t been either. The good news is that Dennis approved of my first piece, though he’d changed the title to “Lilydale K–4 Music Program Is a Hit.”

  He also let me keep my byline.

  “That’s fine if it’s not more than ten hours a week,” Dr. Krause says, picking his clipboard back up. “You want to avoid exertion, particularly in the third trimester.”

  I ask, because Deck wants me to, “What about drinking alcohol?”

  “Forbidden.”

  That sets me back on my heels. I hadn’t wanted to drink, but now that I learn I’m not allowed, I’ve never desired anything more. “Not even one cocktail on special occasions?”

  “No alcohol.”

  “In public, at least.” I say this as if I’m joking, but the cottony sensation in my throat tells me there’s something at stake here, the same thing that made me stand up to the bartender at Little John’s. That if I walk out of this office without asserting myself, I will have walked past a piece of me that I can never return to.

  Dr. Krause gets that eye-narrowing look again and scratches something at the bottom of my chart. “Nowhere. Forbidden. You’re welcome to smoke, but no more than four cigarettes per day. I’ll prescribe Valium if you require more to calm your nerves.”

  “What?” My mother had taken Valium. I’d seen it in the medicine cabinet. “Won’t that hurt the baby?”

  “No. It also won’t hinder your milk production, which is crucial the first week of the baby’s life. You intend to breastfeed?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Nothing to think about, at least that first week. After that, you can switch to formula.”

  It’s a command, not a suggestion. I have never felt more insignificant in my life. I’m not a breeder cow, I whined to Ursula in the Dayton’s Sky Room back when I lived in a world where women had choices. But did we? I’d been glossed over for the promotion at the Star, attacked on the streets. Maybe my sense of control has always been an illusion.

  “Yes, sir,” I say, hanging my head.

  “I’ll see you in four weeks.”

  “What?” My heartbeat picks up. On the one hand, that sounds like a reprieve. No examination! On the other, is it best for the baby to leave without the doctor taking so much as a cursory glance inside? “You haven’t . . . looked at me.”

  “It’s not necessary,” he says, setting down the clipboard and picking up a prescription pad. “My nurse will request your records from your examining physician in Minneapolis, and that will be enough for now. If there are any changes in your condition, come back immediately. Otherwise, four weeks.”

  “Thank you.” Now it’s just relief. I don’t have to let this unfamiliar man put his fingers inside me.

  “Of course. Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  He scribbles on the pad, rips off the prescription, and hands it to me. “You can get this filled at the Ben Franklin. Good day.”

  Once he leaves, I dress, folding the gown and resting it neatly on the edge of the examination table. The prescription is written in a crisp cursive, five milligrams of diazepam, take as needed, three refills. I insert it into an inner purse pocket and am about to exit the room when I notice Dr. Krause has left my chart behind.

  I hesitate. It isn’t meant for my eyes. They’re his private notes.

  But they’re about me.

  I grab the clipboard.

  It’s my writing on the top half—name: Joan Elizabeth Harken. Birth date: July 4, 1940 (you came out with a bang! my mom would joke around Independence Day every year). Address: 325 West Mill Street, Lilydale, MN. Employer: Lilydale Gazette. Reason for visit: five months pregnant.

  The bottom half is Dr. Krause’s penmanship.

  Patient is uncooperative. Possible risk.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Joan! Wait up.”

  Someone is repeating my name as I stumble down the street, but it sounds distant, muddy lumps ricocheting off the cold, wet walls of a deep well.

  Uncooperative. Possible risk.

  I suddenly crave my own mother so badly that my chest seizes. She was impossibly frail at the end, the canvas of who she had been stretched across brittle bones, hardly recognizable. The cancer took her quickly, start to finish four months. I moved home with her, worked during the day to pay both our bills, and spent every evening and weekend with her. Rubbing her arms. Brushing her hair. Reading to her.

  “Remember the good when I’m gone, Joan,” she’d said to me one of those final endless, too-short days.

  I’d startled. I thought she’d been sleeping. This was in her last week, when she spent most of her time unaware. It was better, except when the coughs wrecked her, waking her, and it’d take longer and longer for her to remember where she was.

  But this time, she’d been awake. Watching me.

  Her gaze was gentle, cloudy.

  “Mom.” I reached for water and held it to her. “How are you?”

  Her eyes traveled to the pack of cigarettes at her nightstand. She’d stopped smoking a year earlier, before the cancer was diagnosed. Now that it was consuming her bit by bit, she insisted on the cigarettes always being nearby.

  I want to curse those damn things every remaining day of my life.

  “Dying,” she said, but there was a spark in her eyes. “You?”

  The barest smile creased my cheeks. “Fine. Work was fine.”

  “You get your byline yet?”

  “No, but I will, Momma.”

  “I know you will.” She closed her eyes. I set the water down, thinking she was falling back asleep, but then her lids snapped open. “I want you to remember the good things.”

  I didn’t tell her she’d already said that. “I know, Momma.”

  “The traveling. All the places we got to explore together. How I kept you safe. Remember that.”

  I stroked her thin hair, a by-product of her medication, the one vanity she’d allowed herself now more gray than red. We really had had grand times, been everything to one another. When I got offered a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, she moved to live near me.

  I met Ursula and Libby there.

  All that moving meant I wasn’t particularly good at making friends, but
I wanted to so bad. I stopped spending time with Mom, except for the occasional dinners and phone calls. I landed temp and secretarial jobs when I graduated with my journalism degree, but then I got hired at the Minneapolis Star when I was twenty-five—my dream job. They had me working in the women’s section, but I was going to claw my way up, I knew it, and I was always looking for my big break even though I felt dirty having that much ambition. I tried to hide it, but I think I failed. A lot. I was bad at being a person, but Mom was always steady, and I’d been ignoring her, acting like she wasn’t everything to me.

  And now I was losing her.

  “I’ll remember, Momma,” I murmured. “Always.”

  “I don’t want a funeral,” she said, so quietly that I could have imagined it if she hadn’t continued. “I only have you, Ursula, a couple coworkers that I go out with after work. It’d be a waste of money.”

  The coughing took her then. She lasted another week.

  When she passed, I honored her wish not to hold a funeral, but I made sure the whole world knew how much I’d loved her. I had only a handful of photos of her—her family had been from Florida, she said, either long passed or too far removed to make a difference, and they hadn’t been good to her, and she’d had a Mr. Harken (my dad) for only about five minutes—so it didn’t take me long to pick one for the obituary.

  The obit was my finest writing to date, but I felt alone in the world. I moved back in with Ursula, but I didn’t feel like she was enough. I needed someone who was just mine.

  That’s when Deck came into my life.

  And we were going to have a child, a baby that Dr. Krause thought I might harm. I may not have planned to become pregnant, but I would never hurt my baby. He had no right to enter that in my notes.

  “Joan!”

  The grip is firm on my arm.

  “Catherine,” I say, turning to face Clan’s wife. Migrant Mother.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Catherine is smiling, but her eyes are pinched. “I’ve been chasing you down Augusta Avenue for nearly two blocks! I was visiting family at the nursing home across from Dr. Krause’s office. I saw you come out.”