She eats quickly, passionately, as if she’s been deprived of a home-cooked meal for the greater part of her life, and at night, as I hover in the hallway after we’ve parted ways and she’s drifted into her room, I wait for the door to lock, as it does every night, for that latch to assure her that no one will be slinking into her room, prowling in the shadows while she sleeps.
I hear her, sometimes, in the middle of the night. I hear her subconscious murmur a single phrase while she sleeps: Come with me. Over and over again, Come with me, her voice escalating at times until the words verge on desolate, a do-or-die attempt at persuasion.
Come with me. Come with me.
But who is she talking to, I wonder, and where does she want them to go?
She cleans up after herself, bringing her dishes to the sink, where she washes and dries them by hand though I beg her not to. “Please,” I say. “Leave them. I’m just going to load the dishwasher,” but she does anyway as if she feels she has to, double-and triple-checking sometimes for remnants of food encrusted to the plates or left behind in the tines of the forks, as if such a simple oversight would elicit admonishment, and I picture her, picture Willow, bent over a kitchen chair, receiving the prescribed number of lashings for leaving food behind on a plate, and then a knock on the head to deliver the ochre bruise.
The baby and I sway in the rocking chair, Willow sitting on the sofa in silence. Ruby wiggles in my arms, her mouth plugged with a pacifier, unable to cry, though she wants nothing less than to belt out a bloodcurdling scream. I see the agitation in her eyes, eyes that are shellacked thanks to yet another fever.
I moisten a washcloth and press it to her head, and continue to hum lullabies in the hopes of pacification.
It’s then that Willow turns to me—her voice, in that moment of near-silence startling me—wanting to know in her generally timid, generally submissive tone, “How come you didn’t have any more babies? If you like them so much?” and I feel the air in the room become too thin to breathe.
I could lie. I could evade the question altogether. No one has ever asked me such a question. Not even Zoe. I think back some eleven years. The beginning of the end, or so it felt at the time. Zoe was less than a year old, a cuddlesome creature when she wasn’t in the midst of a colicky rage, the kind that brought neighbors to our door to see what they could do to silence the child so they could sleep. She was just five, maybe six months old when I discovered I was carrying another child, that I was carrying Juliet. We weren’t trying to conceive, Chris and I, but we weren’t taking precautions not to, either. I was absolutely elated when I found out I was pregnant, certain that this was just the beginning of that vast family I longed to have.
How Chris felt about it, I wasn’t entirely sure. It’s soon, he said the day I told him, standing before the bathroom door with a positive pregnancy test in my hand. We already have a baby.
But then he smiled. And there was a hug. And there were conversations over those fleeting few weeks: what we would name the baby and whether or not the baby and Zoe could share a room.
What I noticed first was blood, a watery discharge that turned crimson with time. And then there was the pain. I was certain I was having a miscarriage when I caught sight of the blood there, in my panties, but the doctor assured me the baby was just fine.
A biopsy confirmed stage 1B cervical cancer.
The doctor recommended a radical hysterectomy, which meant first ridding my womb of Juliet. “It’s a simple procedure,” the doctor assured Chris and me, and I read online how they would dilate my cervix, and then scrape the contents of my uterus clean, and I imagined Juliet as the pulp of a pumpkin, being scooped out with a spoon.
No, I said, and Absolutely not, but somehow or other Chris convinced me that an abortion was something we needed to do. If it was later in the pregnancy, he’d said, mimicking the doctor’s words, and If the cancer wasn’t so advanced. And then: I can’t raise Zoe alone, he’d said, if something happens to you. And I thought of Chris and Zoe all alone, and myself, dead, in a tomb. Had the cancer not been so advanced we could have delayed treatment until after the delivery. But such was not the case. As it was, it was the baby or me, and I chose me, a decision that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
The doctor and Chris corrected me every time I said baby. They called her a fetus instead. There’s no way to know, the doctor had said before they discarded my Juliet as medical waste, whether or not she’s a girl. Reproductive organs don’t develop until the third month of pregnancy.
And yet, I knew.
I stared at the pamphlets the doctor handed me in the office, angry that I had gotten so busy with work and Zoe that I’d fallen behind on regular Pap tests, that I’d missed my own six-week postpartum checkup because I couldn’t be bothered. Cervical cancer, the pamphlets said, could be detected early with routine Pap smears, something I’d failed to have. I was angry that I fit none of the risk factors: I didn’t smoke, I wasn’t immunosuppressed and, as far as I knew, I hadn’t come in contact with HPV.
I was the exception. The rarity. The one in a million.