She had lived these moments before. After so much obsessing, and fretting rehearsal of this particular crisis, she thought she should know with clear certainty what she should do, but she was utterly confused. In her mind she had run the gauntlet of shrieking, self-satisfied advocates to the clinic door, been pelted with fetal parts, had her doctor shot from the window just as the procedure was about to start. She’d crept in quietly one morning, stepping carefully over a fat housewife snoozing under her placard, inside a clinic staffed by nurses and doctors in muffled shoes, and had it all go fine, or bled to death. And she’d been pregnant in high school, squeezing her belly under the little desk; in college, suffering the ridicule of the cruel, persecuting frat boys, and suffering the shoeless, hairy-footed lesbians to carry her books for her. She had been pregnant in medical school, when second-trimester complications had rescued her out of numerous pathology exams. She’d given her babies away to kind-looking strangers in the supermarket, and to desperate, well-to-do couples in the lobby of the fertility center, as she passed through on a shortcut to the lecture hall. While Vivian sized up a handsome boy, deciding whether they were worth prophesizing about, Jemma imagined a life for him, his butler, and her baby in a giant New York apartment. She thought she’d obsessed sufficiently, that she’d done everything once in her mind, so that no matter what happened, she’d have some idea of what to do. But she had never imagined this situation.
“Mushrooms are not the issue,” Vivian said, clutching and stroking Jemma’s hands. “Mushrooms are irrelevant. I’ve done the reading. The question is, what will you do? All options are open, now you must choose.”
Jemma said she didn’t see very many options. Mushroom-headed monster or not, what could she do here?
“Do you even know who you’re talking to?” Vivian asked. In school she had headed up the keep-abortion-legal faction among the medical students, and had often engaged in public battle against those who wanted a return to the back-alley days. “You say you are for life,” she had thundered once at her nemesis, a fat, mousy girl who snuck around pinning tiny golden feet to people’s backpacks, or to the hanging edges of their coats, “but really you are for death, and misery, and hatred, and death, and death, and death!” The nemesis, despite her mousiness, and her preference to sneak, and a mouth so small it hardly seemed big enough to admit a straw, was just as loud. They shook the auditorium, and spoiled a physiology review, earning the ill-will of every witness for days.
To illustrate the options, Vivian took Jemma to a synthesizer on the seventh floor, in a nurses’ lounge down the hall from Vivian’s room. It was Vivian’s favorite synthesizer, a tall one, the one where she had ordered her mushrooms, and where she conducted all her fashion experiments. She shut and locked the door and sat Jemma down in front of the shallow bay and the frosted glass panel. “Not that anything has been decided,” she said, “but just so you know that there is a choice, like always, wherever you are, before the end of the world, after the end of the world, on the earth, on the moon, wherever. I don’t care. You always have a choice.” She turned to the panel and spoke with great authority: “RU-486!”
There came the familiar humming noise, and the sound like someone shaking ground glass in a bag, and a rush of warm air from out of the machine. The glass window lifted, and the usual mist spilled out, white and thick, falling to the floor and surrounding their feet. Revealed inside was a pair of knitted blue baby booties. Vivian shook them out; they contained no pills.
Two more weeks passed before Jemma told Rob, all the hated embryology coming back to her in the meantime. She wanted not to remember it, but couldn’t help it. Where was it when she needed it, she wondered, when she needed to know when the blastocyst differentiates into the bilaminar germ disc? It was on the eighth day. Now she remembered, three years and seven miles of water later, when those lost two exam points were no more recoverable than the lost life of Dr. Goode, her anatomy professor, who was always touching his handsome fifty-year-old body to show them this or that bony process, or stroking the long muscles of his thigh in a way that made Jemma’s throat hurt. He had sleepy-looking eyes and never wore socks, and was a theology student before he was an anatomist.
A blastocyst floated in her head. Lying next to Rob, with her eyes closed, she could see it busily dividing and growing. She looked away for a moment, and when she looked back it was bigger. Cytotrophoblast, syncytiotrophoblast, hypoblast, epiblast: she counted the days again on her fingers.
Best not to get too attached, she thought, though of course they were already attached. It had burrowed into her like a mite, and sealed up the wound with a fibrin plug. Anything could happen, though, and no matter what Vivian said she still thought it could come out tripping in each of its three heads. She had a particular feeling, considering it, like she was stuck at the top of a shudder.
It was probably a reflex, Jemma was sure, to think of your own mother, when this happens to you, and to want to call her, if she weren’t dead and dead again. Jemma had been thinking about her, and when she first knew about Calvin. She was older than Jemma was now. They had been trying, and must have been so happy when they found out. She imagined her mother’s pregnancy as a single long day spent sitting in a comfortable chair, brushing her lustrous, lengthening hair and drinking non-hallucinogenic tea — it was all so very different from what lay ahead of Jemma. The hugely pregnant medicine attendings she had known had seemed heroic to her, as had the surgery attending who had excused herself from morning rounds to go deliver and been back for walk rounds in the evening, strolling with her IV pump down the halls at the head of the team. Now they seemed as gruesome as beasts who dropped a litter on the run.
She tried not to put her hand on her belly, but it strayed there as soon as she stopped paying attention to it. Rob kept asking if she was feeling sick, though he only saw her vomit once — the night before she finally told him she’d dashed out of bed just after they’d lain down. Her morning sickness never came in the morning.
“There are a lot of barfy babies in the PICU,” he said, when she came to bed again. “Maybe I brought something back and gave it to you.”
“Maybe,” said Jemma. She was waiting for the right time to tell him, or the right place, but every time and every place seemed wrong.
“I’m just a big fomite,” he said. “Sorry.”
“We’re all fomites here,” she said, sitting up and staring thoughtfully down at her toes. He started to rub her back. She almost thought it was time to tell him.
She was poised to strike just as he was falling asleep, and almost asked, Are you awake? just as his breathing was shifting. Somehow she thought the news would be easier for him if he was drugged with sleep. But she couldn’t speak the words. Nor could she speak them in the morning. She woke first, and woke him by sliding a finger down his chest. She meant for them to be the first words of the day, but all she said was, “Hello, sleepyhead.”
She couldn’t tell him, not when she fled from rounds to have lunch with him in the NICU, not during the random pager-mediated conversations, not when she found him lurking in the hall after she changed out Ella Thims’s gastrostomy tube with Timmy. “You just sort of twist and pull,” Timmy told her, popping the tube in and out of Ella’s stomach while the child watched one of the fancy new cartoons that a subcommittee of parents had ordered up from the angel. They meant well, trying to combine or strengthen virtues by mixing up stories, but the results were almost as strange as the new pornography circulating among the adults. Batman was just and good, but too dark and broody, his whole world in need of a lesson of bright, carefree love, so they moved Pooh Corner to Gotham, and Christopher Robin became Batman’s smooth-limbed sidekick while Piglet wore a rubber suit and lashed a whip alongside Catwoman. Jemma didn’t know what made her more nauseated: the cartoon or the wet, sucking noise the tube made as Timmy popped it in and out of the hole. “You try it!” he told her, but she had to barf, so she excused herself. Years and years ago she used to vomit, not for fun, but to improve herself, but try as she might she could not remember how it could have been anything but an occasion of misery. Now as then she carried a toothbrush everywhere she went and her gums were getting sore.