Chapter Four: Echoes of the Womb

They inform you that gestation is supposed to be this beautiful thing.

Someone who never walked in my shoes told me that.

For me, it was not a rosy cheek and joyous expectation. It was terror, a creeping, inviting terror that burrowed under my skin and made every one of my breaths espouse.

I knew I was pregnant two weeks after I buried my mama.

I flash back to the test strip shaking in my hand, the pale red lines growing dark as if mocking me. The illness wasn't running sickness—it was fear churning in my stomach. I was eighteen, out of work, and nameless, and now I would be someone's mama.

It was just one night.

One hopeless night, one deal, one body paid for stopgap—and the man who gave me the plutocrat dissolved like a bank. Damien—a name I vaguely recalled. I didn't retain the surname. Only a large presence and cold eyes visited my agonies.

I leaned against the restroom wall, back against it, gobbling and exhaling like I'd learned in some composition about stress. The walls were spinning, knees pulsing.

Pregnant.

I mouthed it to myself as if it were a curse.

The apartment was a tired floorboard creaking at regular intervals. Mama's things remained there in the corner, her scarf draped over the table, her Bible lying open on the spirituals, and her slippers set in careful lines as though she just stepped outdoors for a bit. I just googled those slippers for what sounded like forever.

I also stood and called Kattie.

"Sophie, is everything okay?" Her voice came alive at the other end of the line, breathless and upset.

"No," I said, and the news broke. “I am pregnant."

There was silence and also a long shriek. Hold on, “I will be there in ten minutes."

As promised, Kattie was at my door in fifteen minutes. She did not indeed vacillate when she saw my face; she just went on in and hugged me. It was the first time I had allowed anyone to hold me since Mama passed away. I did not know how important that clinch was.

That night, we sat on the floor against the settee, her shoulder under my head as the wind screamed through the open window.

"Do you have any idea what you are going to do?" she asked.

I swallowed hard. "I do not know. I do not have a job, no family, and no plutocrat. I do not indeed have food in the house."

"You have me," she said.

"I am not dragging you into this."

She tore loose, her blue eyes flaming. "You did not drag me in. I walked by myself. You are my sister. Blood cannot bring us closer."

I wish it were true. I had to make it true. Because the road in front of me seemed to have no judgment, no direction, and no destination. Just a barren breadth of living.

Throughout the weeks that went by, I could feel my body changing. I could feel the small twinkle beating inside me indeed when I could not feel my own strength. My mornings were a blur of nausea and dry toast. Fried oil painting smelled to me. My waist expanded so fleetly that I had to adopt size-up clothes from Kattie's cousin, who had just given birth.

I canvassed for dozens of jobs. Cleaner, clerk, receptionist—any job that would pay the rent and antenatal vitamins. But the moment I told them I was pregnant, the interviews would terminate.

"You are youthful." Keep yourself healthy," one director murmured, his smile missing its mark by a bit of an inch.

What he really meant was, "We will not hire someone who will be out on maternity leave in a little while."

So I did side work washing neighbors' laundry, babysitting toddlers, and dealing with secondhand clothes on road corners. I waited in long lines at food banks and walked long distances to the public clinic just to get a checkup. Every now and then, I'd sit in the dark, clinging to the coarse black-and-white print and tale. I am sorry, I am trying.

Kattie was my anchor. She gave up her food and gave me her old mattress when mine was getting too thin. Defended landlords and indeed stood up to a gangster on the road who tried to steal my bag one night, demurred me into stir when my own bases refused to go any farther.

I can still flash back to the night I nearly quit.

It was raining cats and heavy rain. Our roof burst where it rained directly over my bed. I was in bed, soaked to the bone, shivering, clinging to my belly, wondering if my baby could smell how hopeless I was.

I hadn't eaten that day. The electricity was cut off. Kattie worked at home with only a half-burned candle and my thoughts.

I wept until I was dry, and I also screamed. Long, ragged, and broken. I screamed into my pillow, punched it, and smelled it. I cursed Damien for having gone, my mama for having passed away, and myself for being so weak.

That was the night that I decided not to die like this.

I got up, wiped my face, and planned.

I would complete my academy. I would have an honest job, and I would raise my child to know what I had known. I did not know.

Kattie set up a maternity sanctum patronized by a church a week later. It wasn't luxurious, but it was safe. They had nurses, counselors, and food. I got settled in my sixth month and started going to the night academy and doing part-time cleaning services.

It was like having a mountain on my back each day, but with every kick inside my belly, I kept reminding myself why I had to break away.

Do you ever think of him?" Kattie asked one night as we folded and bestowed baby clothes together in side-by-side rows.

"Who?"

"Damien. The in Chesterfield."

I dithered, “Occasionally."

"Do you miss him?"

"No," I replied snappily and also softer, "but I wonder. What if he had stayed? What if I'd taken his number?

Kattie was strangled. “What if he were married? Or did they have five other girls? You got what you demanded that night, Sophie. Do not torture yourself over a ghost."

She was right. Damien was a memory—a mistake that gave me a phenomenon.

I never looked for him. I never said his name before. Occasionally, I would catch his face in my dreams, those black eyes surveying me like he formerly knew that I was shattered—but I would always wake up to Ethan's first kick erasing him.

Ethan.

I did not know his name until the night he was born.

Work came nippy and merciless. No epidural comfort, no private room for me. Just me, sweat, pain, and a midwife yelling, “Push, girl, push!"

I flash back, grasping the bed frame, screaming at the top of my lungs, blood in my eyes, and thinking I was going to die, and also—there he was.

Small, wrinkled, screaming with further intensity than I ever have.

The moment they placed him on my chest, the world went quiet.

His eyes met mine, brown and searching.

"I am your mummy," I said.

And I named him Ethan because it meant strong, firm, and enduring. All the effects I wasn't, but he formerly was.

Kattie arrived an hour later with a teddy bear and a bag of oranges.

"I missed it?" She laughed and cried at the same time.

I jumped, cradling Ethan. “He came beforehand, just like his mother."

She leaned over and kissed my forehead. “You did it, Sophie. You really did it.

And now, a decade later, when Ethan smiles or reads poetry to his class or asks why his skin is the color of fried coffee and his hair the gold of the sun, I flash back to that lift. The pain, the shame, the adaptability I did not know I had.

He saved me.

And I’ll spend the rest of my life guarding him from the truth, from the world, and above all from Damien Knight.

Because Damien may have given me a night of Pluto Crate and remorse, but Ethan is all mine.