The doctor, who was probably used to seeing dumb little girls like me, forced a smile.
“Okay, then, let’s see what we’re dealing with.” She pulled a rolling stool up next to the examination table and grabbed a plastic tube of Vaseline. “This is going to be a bit cold.” She squirted a bunch on my stomach, and it was cold. It made me flinch, which made me hurt.
With my shirt off, you could see the barest hint of the bump that was my baby trying to push its way out of my belly. The doctor took out this flat black paddle thing, which was hooked up to a machine with what looked like a telephone cord. Like one of those things they use to start your heart when it stops.
Seeing that freaked me out. But the paddle wasn’t for hearts. It was for sonograms. Agnes, Theresa, and I watched the grainy black-and-white TV monitor as the doctor moved the paddle all around my stomach. The room was quiet, and my attention wandered from the monitor to the doctor’s face.
Every muscle in her jaw and neck had pulled itself tight, and her forehead was scrunched. After one last go-round with the paddle, she bit her lower lip, pushed her stool back, and looked at me.
“What?” I asked.
The doctor put the paddle back in its holder and took my hands. She looked me straight in the eye.
“I’m sorry, Cheyenne,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “There’s no heartbeat. You’re having a miscarriage.”
One of my sisters gasped—I’m not sure which one—and at first, I didn’t know why. Dr. McCartney kept holding my hands and watching, waiting for me to catch up.
I did.
No heartbeat.
My baby was dead.
HARBINGER JONES
I’m a socially awkward, disfigured, guitar-playing coward. Try to tell that story in two hundred and fifty words or less. It can’t be done. I mean, it literally can’t be done. I know. I tried. At least twenty times I tried.
I finally decided that I should just ignore the word count in the Scranton essay instructions and get everything I could think of down on paper. Then I could go back and edit later.
I had this English teacher in high school who liked to say that “all good writing is rewriting.” I didn’t know what that meant at the time—if she hadn’t taken pity on me, I think I would have failed her class—but now I understood. The musical equivalent is “We’ll fix it in the mix.” When you record music, you try not to worry too much about equalization or effects when you’re laying down basic tracks. You just need to make sure the performances are good. Anything else can be corrected when you mix all the tracks down to the master. Fix it in the mix.
I didn’t know where to start my story, so I started with the obvious: the day I got these scars, the day I was tied to a tree during the thunderstorm. At first it was hard to drag those memories back to the surface. I’d spent a lifetime trying to bury and forget them, like they were the bones of someone I’d murdered. But the more I wrote, the more I needed to write.
I filled pages with details of the storm and the aftermath of being severely burned: the endless medical tests and procedures, how other kids treated me, all that time I spent with Dr. Kenny.
By the time I got to the part of my narrative where I met Johnny, in middle school, the pencil was flying across the page. I remembered every detail like it was yesterday. I could still see the bully—Billy the Behemoth—who Johnny stood up to on my behalf. I could still see Johnny’s eyes staring Billy down.
I finished writing that scene and put the pencil on my desk. Maybe, I thought, the story of my life is really the story of my friendship with Johnny. I never had any siblings, and Johnny was like an unofficial brother. And like all brothers, we loved each other as much as we resented each other.
But did our relationship really define me? Was I so dependent on Johnny that my life didn’t have meaning without him?
No. There was something else besides Johnny. Something bigger. Much bigger.
I smiled as I picked up the pencil again. It felt good to write. Felt good to get so much of it out of me. After a while, the writing wasn’t even about Scranton. The exercise became its own reward.
CHEYENNE BELLE
A late-term miscarriage was what the doctor called it. Anything before twenty weeks—and we figured out that I was sixteen weeks—is a miscarriage. Anything after is a stillbirth. That’s what they told us.
I just lay there and cried. The doctor left the room so my sisters and I could have a few minutes. I don’t know how long I cried, but it was a long time.
I had only just decided to keep the baby, but maybe I’d been leaning that way all along. I mean, I’m definitely pro-choice and all—who am I or anyone else to tell girls what to think or what to do with their bodies—but given who I am and how I was raised, I don’t know if I could’ve made any other decision. It was my choice to keep the baby. I mean, think about the words to “Lullaby.” Of course I was going to keep the baby.