And Then I Forgot Not To Look

Sandy looks into my eyes like the practiced real-estate agent she is. Her savage blonde cut slices against her cheekbone and her whole appearance reminds me of a sleek, minimalist goddess.

She’s pumped me full of energy — confidence even — having given me the proprietary pep talk three times by now. “It’s your body, your future: don’t let anyone else dictate what you do with it.”

I pull in my breath.

And my stomach.

Nothing is showing yet, and for good reason: the balloon gets air around fifteen weeks, or so I am told.

“You can do it,” she says again as if we are at the bottom of a jagged mountain and we’re both looking up, wondering just how one is supposed to summit that peak.

“You’re doing the right thing.”

She’s reminded me, again and again. “It’s not human, not really.”It has no business taking up space inside you — it’s a mindless pariah, sucking out your blood supply. She hadn’t said the last part, just thought it, and so had I. I’d prayed even, prayed to something I was starting to hope had some power, that it would make this little ball of nothingness just up and disappear from inside me.

But it hasn’t, not yet. So I am here. I need an appointment for this. I’m far enough along they have to approve. They have to make sure it’s not ectopic, and so I have to put actual voice to my demand. It would be so much easier just to go to a pharmacy.

I clear my throat.

Sandy has done this twice. First after her divorce, second with bruise marks still wrapped around her arms like tattoos. Collin, two months in, had proved less than the porcelain fixture he appeared to be on the internet, and she “couldn’t fathom bringing his child into this world.”

And me? What had gotten me into this predicament?

I can’t say it was rape, although I could. I could claim all sorts of things about that night. The truth is I was too far gone and lonely and barely awake, moaning my vowels and pressing onward.

And that is a shameful way to bring a child into this world, isn’t it?

“Maron Kraff.”

My spine straightens. It’s my turn.

“Go on,” says Sandy. She pats me on the rear like I’m a prized heifer and I jolt as she winks, “Do it.”

She’s been my best friend since the eighties, or at least it feels that way, although we were both technically about six months old when that decade ended. 'Men come and go,' we famously say, 'but a tight ass can see you through a world of hurt.' There were of course, other things that bonded us too, besides our addiction to HIIT workouts. But at the moment, I can't think of any.

PART II:

When I enter the examination room, all goes silent. It’s as if the blue-suited man and the pink-suited woman have been having a private little gossip about me, and I’ve caught them in the act. She nods to him, looks me up and down, and hurries out like a bird on a mission.

“Sit down,” says the man.

I feel I’m a wayward student being given a talking-to in the principal’s chair. Am I? Where’s Sandy? Then I chide myself. That’s childish. That’s pathetic. I’m here doing the adult thing, and I can handle it alone.

“How are you feeling?”

He reaches out his hand and smiles. “Dr. Bernard.”

There’s white stubble suggesting a shave yesterday. It surrounds a kindly smile on his angular face. I scan his eyes: there are no signs of weariness around the temples, no signs of deep-ridden crow’s feet, like I’ve been developing all of a sudden.

He looks like a grandfather, one who goes out for a 20k trot on Saturdays before picking the tinies up for soccer practice to give their mom a break.

“I’m OK.” I reach out my hand to shake his, then wipe it on my bare leg, without hardly knowing why. It’s hot out there, but in here the AC is on full blast. Still, there’s something oily about the touch we’ve just shared, something I don’t quite like.

“I’ll just do a quick ultrasound,” says Dr. Bernard. “You can change over there.” He points to a small cubicle built into the wall with a high window above it. Like a jail cell, I think, but then I shake the thought, my hands shaking the tiniest bit too. I should be grateful. They’re helping me out of a world of hurt.

I’d seen pregnant women up close before — not for long periods of time of course — but I’d passed them in grocery stores, sometimes with gaggles of their other offspring circling around them like planets in a precarious solar system about to explode.

I had always smiled politely and then taken some brisk steps to break away from their gravity, eyeing the broccoli and cage-free organic eggs in my own basket. I didn’t want to go there. I worked hard on my body, on my health, on me. To throw it all away for that? No way.

That’s how I had viewed pregnancy up until now, and frankly, nothing had changed. Not really.

The idea that something, albeit as minuscule as the top of a pinhead, is growing inside of me is…well it doesn’t sit well. It doesn’t sit at all. I can feel nothing other than an early morning nausea which frankly, is doing me a favor on the scale.

I slip off my short loose summer dress, one that’s far too free and airy for such an event, and ease the blue gown over my head, open at the back. No underwear, of course. Sandy had warned me.

“Ready?”

Dr. Bernard’s eyes are so blue. I hadn’t noticed that before, and suddenly an image of his tiny presumed grandchildren, with those same fierce blue eyes, comes scrawling across the screen of my brain. I shake my head to get the image out.

“Ready.”

I smile and ease my way onto the dental-like chair he’s pointed to.

“It will just be a little cool sensation,” he says, and almost without looking, he sticks in the lathered device. I shiver a tiny bit. I can’t remember my last PAP smear.

He frowns when he looks at the screen. I crane my neck, but it’s tilted away from me, far away.

Sandy had told me about that part too. "Don’t worry, you won’t have to see a thing," she'd said, as if there were something to see. As if there were something to look away from. When she had said that to me, a tiny shiver had gone down my spine, but I had shaken the feeling away. "Better not to think too much," she’d added. "Just do it."

And so here I am, just "doing it," like I'm Michael Jordan or something.

Suddenly, I feel a sting in my eyes and I blink it away.

“Everything looks good,” says Dr. Bernard. “No signs of an ectopic.”

He roots around for a few moments longer, his frown deepening as if he’s in heavy concentration.

“All good,” he finally says. “I’ll write you the prescription and you can pick it up today.”

He’s already taken the device out and has swiveled his chair around to his desk and is scribbling a note. I lie there another moment, legs splayed apart, a strange sensation in my chest, a contraction I didn’t feel before.

“I’d like to see it,” I ask then. My voice is strangely dry. I don’t know what has possessed me. Maybe I am just making sure, maybe just doubly making sure. I want to see that it’s really nothing yet.

He stops and looks me square in the eye, and all the grandfatherly charm has leeched out of him, all in the space of my one single utterance.

He seems to be hesitating a moment, caught in between, but then he shakes his head. “No, sorry. It’s against protocol.”

I feel I’ve been slapped in the face. It’s mine. It’s mine. And I want to see it.

For a moment, a fierce rabidity surges through me. I could stand up right there and take a bite out of his chest.

But instead, I nod, clear my throat, put my legs back together and slide off the examination chair. Without another word, I slip back into the high-windowed cubicle.

I had wanted to be there, not here. I had wanted to be there, somewhere where perhaps, the sun is glancing down at a breathtaking angle, and a lake is lapping gently behind us, and it’s me and some smiling man and we have a home and a rock-solid togetherness to build it on.

I shake my head. You don’t. So don’t. Don't even wonder.

Dr. Bernard hands me the white sheet of paper and smiles. “Good luck,” he says.

And I almost want to scream. The words hit heavy in my gut like a punch. Good luck?

I don’t smile. “Those your grandkids?” I ask, the words out of my mouth before I can pull them in again. I’m pointing to the pictures I’ve just seen on his desk.

He looks wary, as if I’m leading up to something he doesn’t want any part in.

“Yes.”

“They’re beautiful,” I say then. “Got your eyes.”

His smile widens and I can see his pride emanating out like an aura.

“Sure,” he says. “And their mom’s.”

He holds my gaze for a second. “You’re doing the right thing, you know that?”

Yet something is oozing out of me. Could it be the ultrasound jelly he’d slathered on the device?

No. He’d wiped it well.

“Thanks,” I say, and my chest feels again tight and my throat suddenly feels dry so before I can crock out another word, I turn and head out of the room.

PART III:

“You survived.”

Sandy is sitting with her legs crossed, reading Teen Vogue. I needn’t remind her we’re a fair bit closer to fifty than fifteen. I slap the magazine out of her hands and look at the article she’s thumbing through.

Her gaze hits mine. “Light reading?” I say. “A little on the nose perhaps?”

But there’s a tiny shiver running down my spine. The title is in big glossy block: My Body, My Choice, Period.

It’s a sign, I tell myself, although my stomach has revolted at the words. It’s a near-perfect bullseye target sign. Go and get this done.

“Just further educating myself,” says Sandy, pushing her glasses up on her nose. I need not remind her she has no prescription. She wears them, she tells me, when she needs bookish confidence. For some reason or other, she’s chosen to donn them today.

“Let’s go," she says.

And before I know it she’s up from her chair and heading toward the door, and although she’s not yanking my arm, her gravitational pull is so strong, that I find myself following after her trim savage bob cutting toward the exit like a ship in a fierce storm.

She drove today, and as we reach her car I have a split second to wait before the door unlocks. I look up. Big mistake.

On the other side of the high wall, whose metal partitions barely have enough space to see through, are picketers. I see their hands wrapped around the wrought iron bars, and again I think of prison —although why oh why would they seem to be in prison on the outside?

“Your baby has a beating heart. It wants to live.”

My shoulders tense. The automatic lock clicks up and I pull open the door.

“It will love you with all its heart. Don’t destroy him.”

We’re in the car and Sandy is screeching backward. Has she heard too? Her expression is hard and her mouth firm. I see then, that she has.

“Bigots,” she says, her teeth suddenly gritted, her fingers clenching the wheel so her knuckles are white. “Pathetic, mysognistic bigots,” she repeats.

And she puts the car in drive and speeds up toward the open gate, a NASCAR driver gunning for the start line.

But just then, a tiny blonde girl darts out into the sidewalk in front of us.

Sandy cranks the brakes hard but it’s too late. The girl screams and at the same instant I feel the sickening hit as her soft small body bounces against our car, and she goes sailing in a tiny innocent arc, up, and then down, hard, on the pavement.

“Oh my God.”

Sandy has already put it in the park and is up out of the car in an instant. An equally blonde woman is running to the screaming girl. I realize the girl can’t be more than two, maybe three.

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry,” repeats Sandy.

I’ve been frozen in the passenger side until now. Maybe I don’t want to be privy to this crime. Maybe I want to not be counted as an accomplice to murder.

Or a murderer, in fact.

The woman is crouching above the screaming girl, and now a man and two others are crowding around her, hedging her in, leaving Sandy, standing on the periphery of the orbit, hands wringing together, face full of guilt.

But then I am up, out of the car and by her side. I have to be, don’t I? And I’m putting my hand on her locked palms and squeezing and saying “It was a mistake. Just a mistake. She’s going to be OK.”

And then the blonde woman looks up at me, the one I presume is the mom, and the girl is still crying but her shouts have turned now to whimpers as if a faucet on full blast has been attenuated, and there’s a look of sadness in the woman’s eyes as she nods toward the clinic.

“And right in there, you would run over your own child without a second thought?

"This is what you’re doing to your own baby. Don't you see?”

I just stare. There’s no bite in her words, just a terrible sadness, a yearning almost a calling, drawing us in, begging us to see. And that’s why I don’t yell back and that’s why Sandy just grunts and opens and closes her mouth instead of throttling back with a response I am sure she has at the ready.

And then the man next to her nods, after checking all of the little girl’s major bones, and the mom strokes the hair of the whimpering girl and her small piercing blue eyes for a moment, look straight into mine, and there I see it.

Fear. She is afraid I will kill her.

And a bolt of lightning strikes through my heart, and I look at Sandy, but her mouth is set in a hard line as if the woman’s words have bounced right off of her, and for some strange reason, her mantra pops into my head, “Location, location, location,” and I know, deep inside, it’s me who’s trespassing, and not the other way around.