Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 16: Then

Spring was in full bloom on the other side of the car window as Owen and I drove to the doctor's office in silence. Bright little buds burst forth from tired branches. The clear, open sky invited me to hope along with all the new things, including what was growing inside me. But as hard as I tried, I couldn't.

Instead, I fantasized about having a miscarriage right then and there in Owen's Subaru. There would be a lot of blood, and it would stain the beige fabric of the passenger seat. Would whatever came out of me look like a fetus, like something you'd dissect in biology class, or would it just be a gunky mess?

It would hurt, of course, and then I would have to pretend to mourn.

I think about this fetus dying more than I think about it living. That's what I told the psychiatrist who was assigned to monitor me throughout this pregnancy, since I was at high risk for perinatal depression. We had to have a twenty-minute phone call every week, starting last week, and what was I supposed to say? We'd never met in person. And he apparently wasn't allowed to prescribe a pregnant person any drugs that would actually help. So what could he do for me in twenty fucking minutes?

Nothing.

Since the phone call was probably going to turn out to be a waste of time anyway, I had decided to just let myself talk. What harm could it do? I had spent the twenty minutes saying whatever came into my mind without the normal filter that keeps out all the socially unacceptable thoughts. The psychiatrist had listened unperturbed, from what I could tell over the phone, and then he had told me that it was normal to feel overwhelmed during pregnancy and to call him if I kept feeling this way.

That was it.

I was just supposed to notice how I was feeling, and let him know if I started feeling something alarming.

But recently I wasn't feeling anything, most of the time, and that was what alarmed me.

Was this the profound indifference that the mother I read about in the newspaper last week felt while she had looked on as her baby drowned in the bathtub?

It's not that I was actively trying to kill the fetus.

I just did not care in the least if it shriveled up and rotted inside me.

"What are you thinking about, Juju Bear?" Owen asked as we pulled up at a red light.

Having a miscarriage. "Nothing. Just nervous."

I only knew one person who had a miscarriage – well, I only knew one person who told me about her miscarriage. My high school acquaintance, Amanda Lee.

She was also the only other person I knew who had been raped.

No one had believed her when it happened. She had reported it and everything, but the rape kit she did at the hospital was never tested and the case never even went to trial. When she found out she was pregnant, people had said that even if she was raped, she must have been asking for it. The boy who raped her was in our trigonometry class and when she finally came back to school after her miscarriage, he still sat behind her.

She had dropped out of high school and moved away, and I had lost track of her. But through my observant teenage eyes, I had watched her do everything she was supposed to do after she was raped, and I had watched everyone – school administrators, the police, the legal system, her parents – let her down. She had been lucky, in the end, though. She didn't get stuck with a baby.

My thoughts were interrupted when we arrived at the doctor's office. Owen leaned over toward me and rested his hand on my knee for the pep talk he could see I desperately needed. "I know. This one is going to be tough," he said.