“And next time,” the employee tacks on as I back dismally away, losing hope, running blindly into another woman in line, “be sure and bring your ID.”
I make my way out the door, climbing back up to the first floor two steps at a time. The building’s stairwell is industrial and dark, a flash of gray that comes at me quickly. It spirals upward in circles for thirty floors or more. When I arrive on the first floor, slipping through the stairwell door, crowds flood the lobby of the Daley Center. I’m grateful for this, for the anonymity of it all. I camouflage myself among the wayward teens who’ve been summoned here for court, those with purple-dyed hair and heads hidden beneath sweatshirt hoods. I make my way back outside, nowhere closer to finding my father or proving my identity.
As far as the world is concerned, I’m still dead.
eden
September 14, 1996 Egg Harbor
The town was mobbed with people today as it always is on Saturdays, vacationers trying hard to take advantage of the last few warm days before fall arrives. It’s September now, days shy of the equinox, and as September eventually bleeds into October, the seas of people will finally leave. They come for the hundreds of miles of shorelines, the extensive gift shops, the food. But by December, this far north into Wisconsin, the temperatures will hurtle to twenty or thirty degrees, mounds of snow will obstruct the streets, and the skies will be endlessly gray. And then no one will want to be here, least of all me. Aaron and I will spend the Midwest winter as we always do, imagining the warm places in the world we hope to one day go, places where cold and snow don’t exist. St. Lucia, Fiji, Belize.
Places we will never go.
I spent the day while Aaron was at work wandering the town’s streets, simulating a tourist. I visited gift shops; I bought a T-shirt and ice cream, a book on sailing. I rode the Washington Island Ferry through Death’s Door, spending the late-afternoon hours exploring the crystal clear waters and the polished white stones of Schoolhouse Beach, trying to skip rocks out over the lake, and like getting pregnant, failing at that too.
Back in town I watched families wander from store to store, mothers with buggies, fathers with toddlers perched on their backs. I stared at them as afternoon blended into evening, seated on a bench at Beach View Park, watching as families laid out blankets, staking their claim to a patch of land for the night’s sunset display.
The children were everywhere, and I started to wonder why something in so much abundance could ever be hard to achieve.
October 8, 1996 Egg Harbor
Each time Miranda and her boys stop by, she has a new suggestion for me, some tip on how to hasten conception. No subject is too personal or too taboo to discuss, from the style of Aaron’s underwear to various positions that supposedly aid in fertilization as she lounges on my back patio or living room sofa, weather depending, and cites for me the reasons she believes Aaron and I are not yet pregnant—though never once did I ask.
As she talks, Jack and Paul loiter before us, performing for me a song they learned, a magic trick, how they can make their eyes go crossed. They stand before me as Miranda spells out the effects of tight underpants on the male genitalia, saying over and over again, “Look at me, Miss Eden. Look what I can do,” while folding their tongues in half, or trying to make them stretch clear to the ends of their noses, and, as Miranda talks louder to counter their escalating tones, it hits me how attention-starved they are, how they would give anything for her to watch them for a minute, to praise their talents. Every day, there is dirt wedged beneath their nails and some sort of food on their cheeks and chins. Their outfits are cobbled together with clothing that doesn’t match and hardly fits.
I clap my hands for Jack and Paul, but Miranda tells them to go away. To go play.
Every day.
As her baby bump swells more and more, I’m pestered by Miranda to hurry up, to get knocked up, so that her baby and my baby can still go to school together as I’ve promised her they would.
If I wait much longer they’ll be in different grades.
That’s what Miranda has told me.
“September is the cutoff, don’t you know?”
According to Miranda’s timeline, I have until September of next year to have a baby. Twelve months, which leaves only three to get pregnant.
“It’s not that we’re not trying,” I’ve tried to explain, and she counters with a flip of the hand and a slapdash “I know, I know,” and then it’s back to the underwear we go. To help with Aaron’s and my fertility issues, she suggested a pillow beneath my hips to help steer sperm in the right direction. “It’s all about gravity,” she says.
At every visit I watch the size of her own baby bump swell, her maternity shirts no longer able to cover its overwhelming girth. I tell myself that her suggestions are only old wives’ tales, not rooted in truth, but how am I to know if that’s true?
But today when she lounged on my sofa, peering at me with that same expression on her face—mouth parted, eyebrows raised—and asked if I was keeping track of my ovulation, I realized how stupid it was of me, how naive.
This was Aaron’s and my first foray into babymaking. I was sure it was something that just happened, that there was no need to time or plan. In the moment, I told her yes, of course I was keeping track of my dates, because I couldn’t bring myself to say otherwise, to admit to her that it never occurred to me to figure out when I was and when I wasn’t ovulating. Aaron and I both come from large families, and the number of grandchildren our parents have been blessed with is in no way in short supply. It seemed a given that after ample time, after many months of waking up in the morning to Aaron’s soft fingers tracing my bare skin, thumbs hooking through the lacy edges of my underpants, gliding them proficiently over my thighs, sooner or later we’d succeed. We’d make a baby as we intended to do.
But for the first time I’ve come to realize that this is going to take more than time.
After Miranda left I drove to the library and sought out a guidebook on pregnancy and there, in the stacks of books, plotted out my approximate menstrual cycle. I figured out the first date of my last period. I counted backward; I did the math. It wouldn’t be perfect, that I knew—my periods had never been perfect—but it would be close. And close to perfect was better than nothing for me.
And now, knowing that in just two days’ time I will be ovulating fills me with an abundant amount of hope. Aaron and I were doing it wrong all along, missing out on the best times to get pregnant, likely omitting my most fertile days, those negligible hours when conception can occur. On the way home I stopped at the market and picked up a pocket-size calendar and, at home, with a red pen, circled my most fertile days for the next three months, through the end of the year.
This time we’ll get it right.
jessie
I push my way through the turnstile doors and step outside, making my way across the plaza. Beside the Eternal Flame, I pause, overcome with the sudden urge to scale the fence and lie down beside the puny little fire in the fetal position. To fall to my side on the cold concrete, beside the memorial for fallen soldiers. To pull my knees up to my chest in the middle of all those pigeons who huddle around it, trying to keep warm. The land around the flame is thick with birds, the concrete white from their waste. That’s where I want to lie. Because I’m so tired I can no longer stand upright.
People breeze past me. No one bothers to look. A passing shoulder slams into mine. The man never apologizes and I wonder, Can he see me? Am I here?