With his fists tangled in my hair, my one-year-old son, sick with a flu, throws up on my chest and cries because he is scared of the way his body feels when it evacuates itself like this. I’m home alone with my two young children for the next week, and I’m secretly pregnant. In five days, I’ll have an abortion.
*
My dogs have brought home a doe they found in the woods, one which was presumably shot by a hunter but then got away. With their snouts far into her ribcage and snow falling very heavily, I watch the dogs and the doe disappear into each other.
*
Tomorrow a friend and I will smoke cigarettes in the snow while our daughters play upstairs and my sick son naps. My friend will tell me her grandmother is on her deathbed, and, once she dies, my friend’s estranged mother won’t send money to my friend anymore. She’ll use the expression “cut-off” to explain the extent of her financial situation, and I’ll drift from the conversation thinking about scissors cutting through cloth in a slow, straight line. Later, when the house is dark, the combination of progesterone and of the boxed wine I’ve drunk will make me feel like I’m lying on a raft on a wave.
*
I left my job as a teacher’s assistant at Wren’s pre-school to stay home with Leo. As a family, we don’t have enough money to pay our bills. When Leo was born, Medicaid accidentally charged me twelve thousand dollars for the epidural I had gotten, and I pleaded on the phone with the young, male Medicaid call-center employee, trying to explain that the epidural hadn’t even worked, that I had felt everything during the birth, and also the anesthesiologist had somehow squirted my blood into his eyes, and, while I was in the late-stages of labor, I signed consent forms to test my blood for communicable diseases.
*
What’s left of the doe will be buried in snow by tomorrow morning. My pregnancy will keep me awake tonight, and I’ll get up often to vomit.
*
It snows in Ithaca what feels like most of the time, and when it’s not snowing the stone-white sky looks low and one-dimensional. Wren is seven-years-old, and we spend six dollars a week on Beanie Boos which we buy from Party City. She lines them up in our room and their shiny, paralyzed eyes sometimes make them look like prey animals: mortal or immortal, stunned or sparkling.
*
In two days, Wren, Leo, and I will share the same stomach flu. Leo’s puking will persist, and Wren’s will have just started. I can’t separate the nausea of my pregnancy and that of the flu, and likewise our three fevers pressed together on the cold bathroom tile will feel interchangeable.
*
Eight or so hours after I take the first of two pills for my medical abortion, I’ll call the emergency room and ask the on-call nurse if there’s anything at all I can do to reverse what I’ve done. The answer will be no, and in my fever and still sick from the stomach flu, I’ll hang up the phone. Asleep upstairs, Wren and Leo won’t hear me open the door to go smoke in the cold. I’ll imagine the sky, black and clear at night, answers a question I don’t ask out loud, offers something as plain as a dull spoon in an empty bowl.
*
I had a dream in which I had all the money I or my kids would ever need. I found a tree and smoothed my dollars onto a knot until their paper became part of the bark. In the dream, we have enough money to do anything we want to
*
Looking out at the dogs who are still eating the deer, I say quietly, and in their direction, “I hope you never have to be human.”
I’m suspended here and part of me always will be.
I put Leo down on our bed, and I wipe his throw up from my chest. I remove his diaper and have him sleep naked on a soft towel. I give Wren a glass of water and put toothpaste on her toothbrush. I kiss both of my children on their temples. I call the dogs inside from the dark yard, clapping and calling as sternly as I have to in order to pull their instincts away from the doe.
*
I’ll wake up many times tonight.
*
In a few months when the snow melts the doe’s hair will come into the house on our feet, clothes, and skin. It will blow in on the wind; we’ll find it in our food and drinks, and we’ll pull it from between our teeth and tongues. The dogs and other animals will carry off the doe’s bones and remaining scraps of flesh from the yard.
*
I put Leo down on our bed, and I wipe his throw up from my chest. I remove his diaper and have him sleep naked on a soft towel.
I give Wren a glass of water and put toothpaste on her toothbrush.
I kiss both of my children on their temples.
This is the last night that I’ll spend circling, with all my hope, the possibilities.
I’m suspended here and part of me always will be.
I call the dogs inside from the dark yard, clapping and calling as sternly as I have to in order to pull their instincts away from the doe.
