She knows the sound of approaching steps, can tell when the steps are heavy enough that an orderly’s about to poke his head through the curtain and wheel her off to be x-rayed. Sometimes when she hears voices she can’t tell if they’re real or if her mind’s making them up for company. Sometimes the orderlies bring her new drugs, which she swallows still lying on her back on the cot. Drugs for the infections, drugs to help her sleep, drugs for the pain. Mostly, drugs for the pain. The drugs do not take away the pain. When Alcide visits he brings her bottles of liquor, and they keep the curtain closed around them as he unscrews the cap and pours. In the early months, when they still fear one of the nurses will notice, he pours gently, to muffle the sound. Then quickly, once they realize no one will. Carefully he hands the cup to Bessie, who tilts it to swallow. The liquor burns as it enters the body of a woman so malnourished she’s losing half her body weight. But it helps.
At Christmas, the doctors let her leave the hospital for a few days. Alcide borrows a pickup for the occasion, and with the orderlies’ help gets her lying down in the back on some pillows Luann piled there for her. Luann and Lyle move into the living room and give Bessie and Alcide the bedroom. On the bed she can be eye-level with her girls. At night, Alcide lies down next to her, and the children come, too, and bend over her, in turn, to touch their foreheads to her lips. In those moments, they are all together again as a family—all of them, that is, who are left. The girls go to bed, and Bessie and Alcide lie together in the night. When the year turns to 1965, the family celebrates. Then Bessie returns to the hospital.
For five more months she lies on her back encased in plaster, five more months of the X-rays and the drugs for the infections and the drugs for the pain that do not work and five more months of the whiskey. Her body withers inside the cast, until she weighs less than seventy pounds. She is the size of a child.
But while she gets smaller, the cast tightens. Not everywhere. Only around her midsection.
Bessie is five months pregnant.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003
Judge: “I know I can’t ask questions, but—”
Defense attorney: “Would you like me to ask the question?”
Judge: “I just want to know how you get pregnant in that thing.”
Defense attorney: “Judge, I was trying to be delicate and not ask those questions.”
Judge: “I just said what everybody was thinking, you know—what’s up?”
Defense attorney: “Doctor, I believe we’ve decided to leave it to people’s imaginations, have we not?”
In the courtroom, the story is told this way: She is in a body cast. She becomes pregnant.
Ricky grows inside her.
*
Imagine Bessie’s joy when the doctors tell her. Her baby is dead and her boy is dead and the year has brought grief and pain unimaginable and somehow out of all this pain, on one Christmas bed, new life has begun. The doctors had told her she’d never be pregnant again.
This baby is a miracle.
Picture the doctors as they stand by her bed. The white coats they wear, the stethoscopes that hang from their necks, the lives and education they’ve had. Yes, they know she’s happy, but this pregnancy cannot be thought a miracle. She’s been on every drug they can give her, many not intended for pregnant women. The fetus is five months along, which means for five months it has grown against the hard plaster of the cast. She’s been x-rayed countless times. Those might have killed off the pregnancy, but the fetus survived, and now who knows what it has survived with. “Your pregnancy cannot be carried to term,” one doctor says. “It’s not safe. Not for you, and not for any child.”
“This proves you can get pregnant again,” the other reasons with her. “Better to let your body heal now. Better to ready it for another chance.”
Perhaps Alcide holds hands with Bessie as they listen, and perhaps between their pressed, complicit palms passes the knowledge of what the doctors may not know: the whiskey. Eight years must pass before Roe v. Wade, Charity is a Catholic teaching hospital, and still the doctors insist: This baby cannot be born.
But this mother is not going to let her child go.
So the doctors do what they must, and take a saw to the cast, cutting a wide moon into it to halo Bessie’s stomach. Bessie does what a mother must: Inside her cast, she waits. And the baby grows.
On September 11, 1965, they cut Bessie open in one long slash across her abdomen and pull the baby from her. A boy. Seven pounds, two ounces. Ricky Joseph Langley, Bessie names him, the boy who will live in place of the dead son. Alcide and Luann come to the hospital to take him home to where his older sisters wait, giddy, ready to meet their new brother.
Years from now a lawyer will stand in front of twelve jurors and lift a stack of paper made from taping together the pregnancy warnings of all the drugs Bessie took. Then he’ll drop the bottom page—and the pages will unfurl all the way to the floor and smack it. Demerol and Codeine. Librium. Atropine, chloral hydrate, Diabex, and Fluothane. Imferon, Lincocin, Luminal. Menadione, Nembutal, and Vistaril. Then all the X-rays.
Years from now, those twelve jurors will sentence the man who is this child to die. He will be sent to live in a small tile cell on a block where five times he will hear guards come to the grate of another man, pull that man from his cell and lead him off down a corridor and into a chamber from which he’ll never return. The man who is this child will wait in his cell and listen to the condemned man’s footsteps fade down the corridor. The man who is this child will wait to know when it will be his turn.
But none of this, yet. Not in 1965. In 1965, a proud older sister lifts the corner of a blanket and peeks at the brother who is now hers. “Two arms, two legs, five fingers, five toes,” Darlene will say years later, remembering this moment.
That baby was perfect. She checked.
Twelve
New Jersey, 1987
I fall in love with the law through objects. The windowsill of my father’s office is cluttered with them: a snarled metal wheel-well cover that survived a car crash; a plastic replica of a spine, nicked off-kilter as though by a knife; a pair of bullet casings I roll in my palm like marbles, left behind by bullets that didn’t hit my father’s client. When my father wins that verdict, the casings disappear from the windowsill. A week or two later, while my parents are in their bedroom dressing to go out, my mother surprises him with a small wrapped box with a ribbon around it. He unties the ribbon, tears off the paper, eases up the lid, and there it is, the trophy he didn’t realize was missing: those cracked casings, now encased in gold and mounted on cuff links. She smiles at him, takes his palm in hers, and gently twists his wrist. Carefully, she slides the metal prong through his shirt cuff, then flips up the end, securing my father’s cuff with the missed chances of someone else’s life.