by Clara Risser
I have been walking around with a dead baby inside me for five weeks now. My body doesn’t know it’s dead. “Your pituitary gland is not getting the memo,” the midwife tells me, eyeing blood work that proves how confused my body is. I picture my pituitary gland as a young soldier in the trenches, awaiting orders from a general who already surrendered.
How can you be dead if you were never alive? When does life begin? I was taught that humans have a soul, but now, I don’t know. If we have one, how does it get inside of us?
#
Four blood tests and two ultrasounds confirm my pregnancy’s non-viability. I still don’t see it coming. My son was small at his first ultrasound, too. Today, he races through our home, painting the carpets with dry-erase markers and blaming his messes on Tora the cat.Why would this pregnancy be different than my first?
“You might be right about the gestational age,” the midwife says as I stare at the clump of tissue on her computer screen. “We’ll know after labs today and Monday.”
I am optimistic. But as I sit for bloodwork, I hear the midwife talking to her apprentice in the next room. “Missed miscarriage,” she whispers.
She’s wrong. I’ll prove her wrong. But two possibilities exist, each as likely as the other. I am either pregnant or not pregnant. And I must wait the weekend to find out which.
“You know what this reminds me of?” my husband asks later as we lie awake. I turn to him. My husband is what you might call a physics nerd. Years ago, his high school students built robots and bridges that won state competitions and earned acceptance letters to Harvard and MIT. Today, he runs a business selling educational products to other physics teachers.
I trace his outline with my eyes and notice two white circles blinking back at me. I know this man. “Schrӧdinger’s cat?” I offer.
“Yes! Exactly.”
Schrӧdinger’s cat—a thought experiment from quantum physics. In it, a box contains a cat that is either dead or alive. Nobody knows which. And because nobody knows, the cat is both dead and alive. Before opening the box, both options exist in twin universes. But after prying back the lid, the observers find themselves severed from one universe and stuck in another.
“What decides which universe you step into?” my husband asks. “Is it your conviction? Your belief?”
“It’s fate. Fate decides.”
“You don’t understand the question.” He sighs.
God, how I hate him sometimes. “You don’t understand the answer.” I will not blame myself for the outcome of this. It is not my lack of will that might cause this not-yet-a-baby to die. To already be dead.
“I’m choosing the universe where Beanana is alive,” he continues. “You can come with me if you want, but I’m going with or without you.”
#
Maybe life begins the moment you wish it into existence. Has it begun, if only in your head? Does it begin with a name? Beanana—the name we used for over a year while trying to get pregnant. “Two beans, two years apart,” we’d whisper to each other in the night. Bean, our son’s nickname since conception, is short for human bean. A human bean is a life not quite begun, a life in between being and not being. Our second baby couldn’t have the same nickname as the first, so she became Beanana. We gendered her despite our best intentions. She was beaning out there somewhere while we waited for her to join us. But she was taking her time. We were ready when she was ready.
#
Two weeks pass and I arrive for another ultrasound. All my blood work has been iffy, but I remain optimistic. Slow rising hormones are still rising hormones. I should be nine weeks pregnant. My pregnancy tracker app tells me Beanana is the size of a green olive. But it’s clear my babies don’t follow the rules. She’s seven weeks—the size of a blueberry. Old enough for me to hear her heartbeat.
The apprentice from the first appointment greets me. I lie down as she squeezes jelly onto a probe. It is wet and cold and painful as she slides it in. I try to breathe to make my muscles soften.
I watch her watch the screen. Her eyes reveal what her mouth will not. I want to scream but I am muffled, as if plunged underwater. We stay suspended in time—my legs spread open, her eyes aglaze—while neither of us speaks. Then she clears her throat. “This looks the same as it did two weeks ago.”
She removes the probe, and I cover my nakedness. The director of the midwifery practice knocks on the door and comes into the room. She is much older than either of us. She holds me while I cry into my hands.
#
“The products of conception will likely pass without intervention,” the apprentice says once I stop crying. Products of conception. I could introduce my son that way. Hello, everyone. This is Bean— the product of my conception. She continues. “But it may take weeks or months.”
I close my eyes and see my husband’s outline in the darkness. I listen and hear his whisper across our bed sheets: “Two beans, two years apart.” I open my eyes.
“What if I don’t want to wait?”
#
I know it’s not really a baby. There never was a baby. Perhaps not even an embryo. But for a moment, I wish I could have stepped into the other universe instead of this one. The one with a blueberry instead of a blood clot. In that universe, we celebrate my husband’s birthday with our happy secret. In this one, he spends the night before his birthday crying.
The pharmacist scans my medication and looks up. “Do you have questions?”
Don’t worry, I want to say. I’m not killing my baby. It’s already dead! “I’m good,” I manage. I do not look her in the eyes.
Back home, I open the pill bottle with shaking hands. My teeth begin to chatter. I hold my elbows and rock my body, exhaling in counted breaths. “I love you,” I whisper to my belly. Then I shut my eyes and swallow.
My husband takes our son to the park as I lie down to wait. But hours pass and nothing happens. I take another dose of pills. My son comes home, eats dinner, and goes to sleep. To keep busy, I decorate our Christmas tree. The cramps arrive as I untangle lights and soon I have to stop. I crawl to the bathroom as each contraction twists my insides like a meat grinder. Then I lie on the bathroom floor until the pain subsides enough for me to sleep.
In the morning, I pull down my pants, expecting a blood-soaked mess. Instead, a snow-white maxi pad perches upon my underwear, mocking me. I call the midwife. “Sounds like you need a D&C.”
#
My son loved nursing. Milk was how we said good morning and good night each day. When he turned one, he didn’t want to stop. It wasn’t supposed to matter. “Breastfeeding is not an effective form of birth control,” a coworker with Irish twins once warned. It’s true. Except when it isn’t.
One by one, my friends with toddlers announced their second pregnancies. But my second baby never came. Each month, I grew angrier at my body for what it would not do. On my son’s second birthday, we nursed for the last time. “Mama has no more milk?” he asked, patting my tummy. When I nodded, his eyes widened. “I drank it all?”
I got my period back seven weeks later.
#
“You can try misoprostol again,” the surgeon says. “I don’t know why the midwife gave you 600 micrograms. 800 is much more effective. And you should take the pills vaginally. Not by mouth.”
I picture the midwife’s arthritic fingers twisting around her speculum. Two years ago, she rescued me from a doctor who would not honor my request for an unmedicated delivery. Because of her, I gave birth in a tranquil room, lights dim, catching my son in my own hands. But now I am frustrated with this midwife. For giving me a stupid dose of medication. For being close to retirement. For not reading medical journals and keeping up with research.
I am frustrated with the people in this room and the universe I have stepped into. In the other universe, I have not met these people. In that universe, my baby is a kumquat.
I shake my head. “I want this to be over.”
“That’s fine. We’ll do it tomorrow afternoon.”
I wonder what will happen to the not-a-baby after she removes it. Before, I’d planned to bury her in the backyard with my tulip bulbs. In spring, she’d come up with the flowers and be born anew.
Now, I see her in a biohazard bag. Joining medical waste and traveling somewhere… where? An incinerator? Would she be discarded, with gallbladders and tumors and other scary things?
“I know this is a strange question, but can I take it with me?” I ask. The surgeon stares, unblinking. But why not? It comes from my body, belongs to me.
“We can’t give it to you. You’ll have to arrange that with a funeral home.” She leaves for her office and brings back a list. How silly. I never claimed it was a human.
#
Back home, I call one of the numbers. The funeral director is so sorry my baby died. She can bury it. They have tiny caskets. I clarify. This is not a fetus. I do not want to bury it in a cemetery. I want to bury it at home. She pauses before speaking again. In her thirty year career, nobody has ever made such a request. It is illegal to bury human remains in your backyard without a special permit. And the body needs to be embalmed. “I’m sorry the hospital was not forthcoming with you. They may not understand the laws.”
We hang up. I google the word “embalming” and learn that it involves removal of body fluid. Then I laugh. How would you remove body fluid from a blood clot? I picture a mortician’s intern opening a box and finding my not-a-baby inside. “Excuse me?” she would ask her boss. “I’m not sure what to do here.”
I think of a long-forgotten movie—Eraserhead. In the final scene, a father cuts his alien baby’s swaddling clothes with scissors and discovers that the swaddle is the baby’s skin. Then its organs all fall out.
I picture this scene. I laugh and laugh and laugh.
#
“It’s not your fault, you know,” the midwife says at one of my appointments. I wonder how she can be sure. In October, we renovated our home. I sanded and painted. Tore up flooring, ripped out tiles. Around the time the egg implanted, a man reglazed our bathtub. He wore a hazmat suit and a gas mask while he worked. I sat outside, breathed in fumes through the open bathroom window, and varnished our deck.
#
I am not God. I cannot know the moment of ensoulment. What if my not-a-baby has one? I picture an amorphous body in a trash can, abandoned by the world. Then I cancel the D&C.
Later, the surgeon hands me a small, orange box with the outline of a woman’s body on it. “This is mifepristone,” she says. “The other abortion pill. Take this twenty-four hours before you take misoprostol. It’ll work better.” I put the cardboard box inside my wallet and drive home.
#
In another universe, I make an ornament from my ultrasound pictures. I wrap the ornament and stick it under the tree. We open it on Christmas morning and admire our new baby. That universe is one of summer birthdays, of barbecues and pool parties. That universe contains bright red Popsicles, the ice melting down the cheeks and chins of my two summer babies. I picture them—my two little beans—splashing in a kiddie pool, their sticky faces smiling up at me.
In this universe, my pad is saturated again. Blood oozes down my legs and outside the toilet bowl. As I sit, a clot dislodges and drops into the dark red water. Something sits on the pad in my underwear. Something thick and beefy and substantial. I stare at it, searching for answers. For the baby trapped inside. The baby that never was and never will be.
#
Five days pass, bringing us to the eve of Christmas Eve. My mother sits in a recliner, grunting disapprovals and making snake-like sounds as my son bounces around her living room. I do not tell her about the not-a-baby. Instead, I take my son to the aquarium.
In the public bathroom, I am surprised by the amount of blood. I’ve soaked through my pad in under an hour. A nurse on the phone assures me this is normal. I walk from room to room, the bleeding steady as shower water, as my son points at fish and frogs, sharks and orcas.
Later, I pace back and forth while my son explores each crevice of my childhood home. We are in the dining room observing my mother’s baby blue cabinets when something enormous slips from my vagina. “I need to go to the bathroom!” I shout before running upstairs. My son wails and chases after me, but I get there first and slam the door. I pull down my pants as blood spills onto the floor, splashing the bath mat with maroon. A clot the size of a baseball sits atop my pad. I push my chin to stop my teeth from chattering as my son bangs on the door, screaming.
“You all right?” my mother asks once I make it back downstairs.
“Yes,” I say. Everything will be all right now.
#
“Sometimes I worry about it happening again,” I tell my husband. We are walking back to our car after lunch, and the streets are slushy with snow. “I know we’ll get pregnant. But I can’t take another miscarriage.”
He nods, wiping his dirty shoes on a clean patch. “You know what Brett said about the business? It’s interesting because—”
“No. I don’t give a fuck about the business!” We are silent on the drive home.
“When are you going to get over it?” he asks once we have parked. “I’m tired of hearing about this. You bring up the miscarriage in random conversation, out of nowhere. I want to move forward, but you keep pulling me back.”
I stare out the car window. In another universe, my baby is a lemon.
#
In January, a Christmas card arrives in the mail.“We’re sorry for our late holiday card,” it reads. “But this isn’t the only thing late!” Her second baby is due in July. In another universe, mine is too. I put the card on the fridge.
“CONGRATULATIONS,” I text her. “I’m beyond excited for you!”
Then I go upstairs.
In bed, my husband grabs my hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t support you better through this,” he whispers. “You know I chose the universe with you, right? I’ll always choose the universe with you.” I squeeze his hand and close my eyes.
#
Somewhere in the cosmos is a child with a face like ours. Her smile reveals a sticky gum line dripping red from the Popsicle she has devoured. She tumbles down the slide after her brother, displacing wood chips and dirt as their little bodies collide. The air fills with dust and giggles. She sits up and her hair—a lion’s mane propped up by static—surrounds her tiny head. She laughs again, and as her neck rolls back, her eyes lift to the sky. In another universe, my baby is alive. My baby is free.
Clara Risser began writing at six years old, when her father gifted her a drugstore diary, complete with lock and key. Today, though the medium has changed, she finds writing just as cathartic. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine.