When Barbara told Dale, after a doctor’s appointment, that the baby was now the size of a pea, Dale took to calling the baby Li’l Pea. As Barbara relayed this anecdote to Evelyn, Evelyn heard her mother’s voice catch.
Barbara was three months pregnant and blotting white paint for a sheep’s fleece onto a mural in the baby’s room when she started bleeding. There were cramps and dried blood in her underwear, Barbara said—and here Evelyn again tried to make her stop, but Barbara, who had barely acknowledged the existence of bodily functions in her life, seemed insistent on giving Evelyn every detail of the miscarriage without betraying any emotion about it. She drove herself to the hospital, as Dale was trying a case in California, and was given sedatives. When she awoke, the doctor told her that she had lost the baby—that she had lost the baby.
The bleeding went on for more than two weeks, when Barbara would awake after a restless tossing sleep in the middle of the night to more cramps, more expulsion, waiting for her body and her baby to disintegrate. Each new cramp mocked her body’s inhospitableness, her inability to do this one simple and basic thing that women all over the world could do and she could not. At Dale’s urging, she went to church after the miscarriage, but left when the priest asked the congregation to pray for the people who have died, and she didn’t know whether the church thought that the collection of cells inside her had been a person who had died.
Then your father, Barbara said, her face grim. Your father. He did nothing but work for weeks after. He sent his secretary to check in during the day—his secretary, she said. Ten weeks after the miscarriage, Dale arrived home early. “He told me that he’d looked at everything—my medical records, my medications—without my permission—and found that there was a cause for it. That a drug I was taking, pentathilinate, was problematic, and that there were other cases where women had miscarried while taking the drug. He found a doctor in Kentucky who refused to let pregnant patients near the stuff.”
Evelyn remembered reading about the case. Her father had shown her a Washington Post article about it. Thanks to his case and others like it, now women had to sign something promising they wouldn’t get pregnant if they were taking pentathilinate. Dale had cemented his reputation with the case. He’d asked the jury and onlookers to imagine what the little pea—the phrase her father used, she remembered with a wisp of nausea—would be feeling, saying, “‘Let me live. Let me hold on,’ right as she could feel that drug working against her.” The Post had said his speaking in the voice of the unborn baby had made some jurors sob, especially as he described the life the girl could be living now, toddling around and grabbing everything in sight and growing shocks of silken hair. Dale Beegan had to stop at that point, the paper said, to gather himself at the podium; the reporter could see his shoulders shaking.
“He wanted me to testify,” Barbara had said. “He thought I’d be just the ideal witness, up there serving up my past to perfect strangers so they could judge me. I didn’t know, Evelyn. I would never have taken the drug if I’d known. It was for skin, just for clear skin, and I never would’ve.”
“It’s okay,” said Evelyn, lifting her gaze from the creek to her mother.
“We didn’t know then—”
“It’s okay,” Evelyn said again.
“It wasn’t his,” her mother said, anger piercing the words.
“The baby?” Evelyn said, too loudly.
“Of course the baby was his, Evelyn. What on earth gets into your mind? It just, it wasn’t his to take. To exploit. I’m the one who lost the baby.”
Evelyn guessed her parents started sleeping in separate rooms starting then.