“I’ve never seen them before,” her mother said, squinting through her drugstore glasses. “They must be a scam.”
“A scam to do what?”
Her mother was quiet for a very long time. “To get a kidney,” she said softly, finally, staring at her daughter like she was God’s own idiot.
* * *
■ ■ ■
There was grant money set aside in Obamacare to do a complete exome sequencing of the baby’s DNA, which pleased her on both the highest and the pettiest possible level: her father could never say the word in that tone again. “Don’t expect too much—we’re looking for a single misspelling in a single word on a single page of a very long book,” the geneticist told them. She felt for a moment that he had wandered onto her turf. The animal things in her bristled. Sneazing, she thought, involuntarily.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The error was in an overgrowth pathway, which meant that what was happening to the baby could not and would not stop, there was in her arms and legs and head and heart a kind of absolutism that was almost joy. Inside her mother she was a pinwheel of vigor, every minute announcing her readiness, every minute saying, hey, put me in.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Because of this vigor and this wheeling and this insistence she felt more fitted to life than the rest of them—she was what life was, a grand and unexpected overreach, a leap out onto land. “I thought she was stronger than other babies,” her sister said, and she was right; “I thought she was protecting me,” her sister said, and who was to say she wasn’t?
* * *
■ ■ ■
“We know so little about the !”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Dread rose in their hearts upon hearing the worst seven words in the English language. There was a new law in Ohio. It stated that it was a felony to induce a pregnant woman before thirty-seven weeks, no matter what had gone wrong, no matter how big her baby’s head was. Previously it had been a misdemeanor, a far less draconian charge. The law itself was only a month old: fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the doctors’ faces.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I’ll write an article! she thought wildly. I’ll blow the whole thing wide open! I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll post about it!
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Men make these laws,” she told her mother, “and they also don’t know where a girl pees from.” She had once spent an entire afternoon figuring out where she peed from, with the help of a Clinique Free Bonus hand mirror and a series of shocking contortions she could no longer achieve. It had actually been extremely difficult.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent his entire existence crusading against the exception. His white-hairy hand traveled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?
* * *
■ ■ ■
Another thing he said: “They’ll do an abortion right up to the very last minute . . . you know, health of the mother,” putting the last phrase in finger quotes, even as his daughter sat before him in her wheelchair. When that sentence woke her in the purple part of night, she would tug her phone off the bedside table, post the words eat the police in the portal, wait for it to get sixty-nine likes, then delete it. This, in its childishness, calmed the thrash of helplessness in her stomach so muscular that it almost seemed to have its own heartbeat.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The baby was information printed on pink paper. The baby did not know the news. The baby kicked and pretended to breathe to the sounds of bright horns: don’t sit under the apple tree, Duke and Ella, an America she was in and must have understood, was ready to join, America! The baby went mad when her mother drank a single Coca-Cola.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her sister would sometimes grow a dull brick red when another woman in the waiting room, due any minute now, went outside to chain-smoke in the blooming courtyard. To cheer her up, she considered telling her about that post where someone claimed that telling pregnant women not to shoot up heroin was classist, or something like that. Ha ha, that post ruled! She laughed out loud just remembering it but snapped her mouth shut as soon as she heard herself. She had started laughing like a witch five years ago as a joke and now she couldn’t stop.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Any kids?” one of the nurses asked her. No. She hesitated so long she could feel her hair growing. A cat. Named Dr. Butthole.