The Age of the Child

by Kristen Tsetsi

  She would also have a tobacco cigarette as soon as it was over. Just one, from one of the doctors she had seen standing beside the ashtray every time she had visited for her ultrasounds, heartbeat checks, or any of the other costly procedures deemed critical routine care.

  There had been only one cigarette in her life. In her second year of college, a classmate named Peter, whose mother, thanks to a tip, had made a fortune in land-line telephone stock after the ban on cellular and smart phones, always smoked expensive tobacco cigarettes. (“No way I’m using juice after that last contamination.”) While standing outside after their American History final, he held one out to her. Katherine of course knew the chemicals were dangerous and hated the very behavior of smoking for that reason, but with every drag that enveloped her lungs, she loved it for the same reason. How effortless it was, she thought through a deliciously long exhale, for someone like her, always the good girl until twenty minutes before when she and Peter had cheated on their final, to punish herself.

  She had smoked the cigarette down, inhaling so long and so deep she had gagged on the heat of the cherry flooding the filter.

  Katherine listened for signs that Graham was awake, but the upstairs was quiet. Her alarm, which she had set for both of them, would go off in five minutes. She turned up the TV as she sat on the front edge of the couch cushion, her legs spread and her pelvis dipped. She broke off a bite of cranberry muffin and set the rest on the coffee table.

  “…stopped allowing stores to sell the tried and true tighty-whities because of reduced sperm growth. What next?” Dean Stacey challenged viewers from his red couch. “I’ll tell you! People—men and women—giving themselves chlamydia and gonorrhea. Chlamydia! Gonorrhea! On purpose! These are the people none of us want having kids, anyway, right, folks? May they succeed beyond their wildest dreams.” He shaped his finger and thumb into a handgun and shot himself in the temple. “In other news, finally, finally, the government is doing something about this welfare crisis. Sources saying democrats and republicans are—hold on, now—working together to abolish welfare. Good, because I see no reason my tax dollars should pay for not only my kids, but yours. If you can’t afford ‘em, don’t have ‘em. And we all know how not to have kids, now, don’t we boys and g—”

  “What’re you watching?” He yawned behind her.

  “Nothing.” Katherine slapped the power button.

  “I thought you hated that stuff.”

  She twisted to face him. “Which is why I never watch it.”

  He swept a glance from her top to her bottom. “Already dressed and ready to go, huh? Have the car loaded, too?”

  She did, but she said nothing. His wide smile and sloppy shirt and pants unnerved her. “The coffee is made,” she said.

  His walk to the coffee pot lacked its usual springiness. The heels of his slippers dragged.

  “When this is over,” she said to Graham’s back as he poured his coffee and added a lot or a little bit of cream, “please tell me we can return to being who we really are.”

  He turned and winked at her and stirred. “Of course! I’m looking for-ward to it.”

  Katherine got up and sat at the kitchen table with the day-old Daily Fact she had already read that morning after finding it on her placemat. Deliveries had been sporadic because of the snow, and Katherine had been missing her daily updates. It touched her that Graham had gone out of his way the night before to bring her a copy.

  “Thank you for the paper,” she said. “What time did you get in last night?”

  “Not too late.” He sat across from her and sipped his coffee. “What’s new in America yesterday?”

  “Well,” Katherine said and skimmed the headlines. “Let me see… A…um, a doctor imprisoned for providing…for providing illegal abortions—is there any other kind, I wonder?—‘hopes to appeal her conviction citing mitigating circumstances. Harriet Beaman, forty-one, claimed in court Tuesday that her procedures were never intended to succeed. Instead, she said, she wanted to,’ and this is her quote, ‘“assist law enforcement and reduce the burden on taxpayers by eliminating vile abortionists before they could reach the court system.”’ End quote. It goes on to say they can connect her to the deaths of three women, but that there may have been more.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Will she get off?”

  “Let me…Let me see. … She has yet to appeal, as I… Her attorney…her attorney thinks she has a case, but the prosecution says vigilantism, ‘even when performed with the best interests of the general population in mind, is unlawful.’”

  “Good,” Graham said. “What else?”

  “What is this, Graham?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” He scratched at the dark stubble on his cheek, pulling at the skin under his eye. Katherine noticed how loose it was, how gray it looked.

  She said, “Yes, you do.”

  He crossed his legs and sipped his coffee. “This is me trying to have a nice, normal morning with my wife.”

  “This is not normal.”

  “It’ll do, Katherine.” He turned toward the window. She watched him for so long that he eventually flicked a glance in her direction, making brief and clearly unintentional eye contact. Eyes on the window again, he said, “Please.”

  “Do you love me, Graham?”

  “Painfully and forever.”

  She opened the newspaper to pretend to read the second page.

  “Do you know,” he said, “I think you’ve asked me to confirm I love you too many times, now. Even today, when I’ll see our baby come out of your body and go home in someone else’s arms, you want me to reassure you again, to tell you yes. So, yes. Yes! I love you, I love you, I love you.” He sipped from his mug and slammed it on the table, all the while holding a pleasant expression. “I think I’ve told you enough for a lifetime by now, don’t you?” He laughed a strained, good-natured laugh and flapped his hand to shake off coffee pooled between his thumb and index finger.

  Katherine said, “Yes, Graham,” but because he had just mentioned the hand-off to the agency, she was incapable of concentrating on almost anything else. In a matter of hours, she would walk back through the front door as Katherine. Just Katherine.

  But, no, she remembered, she would in fact not come home that afternoon. She would still be in the hospital.

  Graham looked at her with raised eyebrows.

  “Yes?” she said.

  He pointed at the paper with his eyes. She scanned the Fact for something she wanted to read.

  Pound employees elated by recent dog fostering trend

  Pennyroyal overdoses rise, straining urgent care centers

  Economists predict gradual increase in poverty and crime

  “‘Formation of anti-vigilante group vigilante group vexes police,’” she offered.

  “Ha!” he said. “Read it?”

  The headline’s levity was misleading. Police had arrested two women and a man, all in their twenties, after discovering two bodies in a basement apartment. The victims had been

  strangled to death with black market ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms knotted together at their ring bases and reservoir tips. The apartment’s walls were papered with photographs and detailed, handwritten notes cataloging everything from home addresses and weekend habits to the daily schedules of at least sixty individuals believed to be targets of the pro-creation vigilante group calling itself “The Guardians.”

  Police Lt. Hazel Mapleton said photographs of two women, alleged victims of the Guardians vigilante group, were glued with contraceptive gel to the foreheads of the deceased. Names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  “I do recognize one of the women from the forehead photo-graphs, yes. A science teacher. She disappeared, oh, two years ago, and we found her last Easter. The case was very tragic, very tragic,” Mapleton said.

  Sgt. Deirdre Bole apprehended suspects Witherell, Jacobs, and Anderson in a narrow tunnel behin
d a false end to one of several plowed paths police believe the alleged perpetrators created as diversions. Bole said she identified the false wall after noticing small holes in the snow formed and held in place with plastic straws. The suspects, who were found huddled at the far end of their shelter near an empty box of granola bars, have been hospitalized to treat dehydration, police said.

  “Killing is hungry work,” Bole said, adding, “It’s kind of funny they didn’t think to bring water. Everything takes practice, I guess.”

  Katherine looked up when she finished reading.

  Graham checked his watch and rubbed his eyes. “How about another one.”

  “Did you not already read the p—”

  “I came home, I put it down, I went to bed.” He smiled, an afterthought.

  She turned the page toState to join national fuck database, and it occurred to her that she could close the newspaper and slide it across the table for him to make his own selections. So, she did. He smiled, said thank you, and somehow opened directly to that article. She went upstairs.

  Vague shadows filled the dark bedroom. Katherine pushed the curtains aside and stood at the window. She looked at her watch. They would leave in fifteen minutes to be there well before her surgery for what the doctor had said were essential preparations.

  The sun, sitting just below the horizon, spread thin light over the wash of snow concealing their acres of wild grass and weeds. Their red truck with its dull metal plow sat in position to take them to the hospital.

  “Graham,” she called.

  “Still here,” he called back.

  “Gas?” she yelled.

  “Last night,” he screamed.

  A bright sliver started to crest the low, distant hills, fogging the window with gold. She squinted as the sun climbed higher, her eyes inadvertently lowering to the reflection of her abdomen, draped in black. (It had not been a symbolic choice, but a question of comfort. It was a cotton shirt, big and soft, old and worn. It was her favorite. She felt no need to defend the shirt to herself any further.)

  For the first time since learning she was pregnant, Katherine pressed one hand to one side, the other hand to the other side. Her spread fingers moved as if independent of her control, exploring the massive curve, sinking into the dents, examining the foreign shape of her belly button. She rocked side to side and hummed a tune, the words working themselves out in a near whisper. “See you later, alligator...” She cradled the weight and watched clouds creep toward the sun, ignoring the sudden ringing in the kitchen and Graham’s muffled voice.

  When his talking went on longer than she thought it should so early in the morning, she went to the door to listen.

  “…don’t know, Ern. If Margaret’s saying not to, I don’t—”

  “What is it? What is Margaret saying?” Katherine shouted.

  “She’s saying Ernie shouldn’t ask us to drive her to the hospital,” he yelled, “but Ernie says—”

  “The hospital?” Katherine ran to the stairs and gripped the railing on the way down. “What for? Is she all right?”

  Graham yelled, “Ernie says he thinks she could be—Oh, there you are—breech.”

  Katherine took the phone from Graham and told Ernie they would of course be there. “Why do you think the baby is br—”

  “They said wait and see,” Ernie said, “that it might turn, but she’s really hurting and we don’t know, and—Look, I know you have your own appointment, but I have no truck, and she wasn’t due for a week, anyway, and you’d think hospitals would’ve found some way to get a team of plows...”

  Katherine jerked her chin at the front door. Graham plucked his key chain from the bowl in the entry and started the truck, then put on his coat.

  “I’m sorry, Kat,” Margaret hollered in the background. “This is your big day, and I’m ruining everything!”

  Ernie said to Katherine, “She didn’t want to call you. We took the car and hoped for the best, but we kept hitting snow. The ambulance we called forty-five minutes ago is probably doing the same thing and getting stuck every which way.”

  Katherine dragged the phone cord to the coat tree and worked her arms into her sleeves while juggling the hand set. “Please tell Margaret I appreciate that she remembers my big day, but that we have plenty of time. The truck is already warming up.”

  What Ernie had said about “every which way” was proving to be true along the way to Forest Retreat Estates. Graham could leave the plow raised for three blocks before having to lower it for three more. Up for two, down for five. Up for one, down for a half, up again for three, and down again. Katherine watched the clock and was satisfied they would make it on time for her appointment. If she were late at all it would only be for the preparatory steps. They had probably exaggerated how much time was needed.

  “Uh, oh.” Graham hit the brakes.

  Katherine lurched against her seatbelt. Just ahead, at the breakaway from a tight curve, a cluster of vehicles had accordioned themselves against a front car facing the wrong way, its rear end embedded in a snow barrier where whoever had thus far cleared the road had abruptly decided to stop and turn around. (Another citizen street clearer would presumably have been responsible for the connecting section, but people slept in, or they fought with their plowing partners, or they ran out of gas, or they simply forgot.) No bodies lay in the road. She and Graham searched the cars for anyone injured or dead, but each of the mangled cars was empty. They returned to the truck.

  They were half a mile from Forest Lane, and evergreens lined either side of the road against a shoulder too narrow for the truck.

  “Go back,” Katherine said. “Take the field around the woods.”

  “We don’t know what’s under the snow out there or how far out of the way these woods’ll take us.”

  Katherine got out and went around to the driver’s side, scooted Graham into the passenger seat, and climbed behind the wheel. The reflection in the rearview mirror took her only as far as the bend.

  With Graham positioned at a point in the curve that allowed him to watch for approaching traffic while remaining visible to her, Katherine lowered the plow and aimed the truck at the cars that had the highest probability of being moved out of the way.

  EIGHT

  Katherine, Margaret, Graham, and Ernie arrived at American Healthcare fifteen minutes late for Katherine’s procedure (she had more than missed the two hour preparatory window). The critical fifteen minutes had been used at the scene of the pileup trying to placate a driver of one of the abandoned cars, a woman who had returned with a tow truck at the same time Katherine was passing back through the clearing she had made by all but destroying three vehicles. Upon seeing the plow, the woman had jumped out of the moving tow’s passenger seat and planted herself in front of Katherine’s truck until Ernie leaped out, charged her, and tossed her into the snow. This alarmed the tow truck driver, who backed down the road as fast as he could with Katherine following close behind, their trucks nearly nose to nose.

  Upon entering the hospital, Ernie grabbed a wheelchair, plopped Margaret into it, and, screaming, “Breech! Breech!” raced her past reception and through the double doors reading EMERGENCY.

  Katherine and Graham went directly to the elevator. Between the ground floor and the second floor, Katherine was so worried about Margaret that she held Graham’s hand. He released himself when they reached the sign-in station on the second floor, where Katherine pleaded with the man behind the counter to find Doctor Martin. Surely the doctor would understand why they had been late and could find time for Katherine in the schedule. It would hardly do, she said cheerfully, to have no baby to relinquish to the agent from the Happy Baby Agency, would it? Could Katherine not possibly put on the gown and wait in a room for however long it took Doctor Martin to be available?

  Katherine could not wait in a room, the man said. The doctor was quite busy and had, in fact, just been called away to perform an emergency C-section, which would back up her other appointments
“with patients who were on time.”

  As luck (or misfortune—undoubtedly both) would have it, the stress of not achieving her long awaited autonomy was seemingly too much to add to Katherine’s anxiety over Margaret. At least, that was what she would credit with breaking her water as she stood in front of the reception nurse.

  Shaking what she could of the amniotic fluid off her feet, she said, “Epidural, please.” Katherine had read plenty about childbirth in preparation for an unplanned delivery. She tried not to be upset that it was happening. There was nothing she could do to change it. She could numb herself, and that was all.

  Graham looked down at Katherine’s feet, and then up at her. His eyes bulged and a manic grin followed. Katherine sighed.

  “Ms. Oxford, I’m sorry, but like I said, Doctor Martin won’t be able to perform your C-section today. And she rarely gives an epidural for a scheduled C-section, anyway. She likes the spinal.”

  “Her water broke!” Graham yelped. “She’s having it! She’s having it!”

  “Epidural, please.”

  Katherine and Margaret delivered their daughters two hours and two floors apart, they would later learn.

  Because she had thought she was hearing Margaret’s birthing moans, and not her post-operative grief over an unwanted C-section, Katherine had listened throughout her own delivery (greatly relieved that Margaret was alive) to share in Margaret’s moment in some small way.

  Listening had also effectively distracted her from hearing things having to do with her own experience. For the rest of it, the epidural had prevented her from feeling any more than she had to, and closing her eyes had saved her from seeing. She would never know Graham’s reaction to whatever it was he had witnessed at his end, whether before, during, or after. Katherine’s only conscious involvement had been to push when told. When it was over, she had kept her eyes closed (ignoring as well as she could the activity and loud chatter among hospital staff and Graham) until Doctor Martin’s replacement had taken the baby out of the room at Katherine’s instruction. The last she had heard from Graham was the sound of his hard tapping heels following close behind the doctor.