Delicate Condition, page 31
Panic fluttered through me. I was wrong, I thought instantly. She wasn’t a normal baby after all; there was something they could see, something that I couldn’t.
“What’s wrong?” I tried to sit up. “Where are they taking her?”
In that moment I didn’t care what was wrong with her. I just wanted her back.
Someone, another nurse, came up beside me and coaxed me back down. “You need to rest. You’re very tired.”
I didn’t want to let her out of my sight, but I didn’t have the energy to fight. My baby girl. I wanted to count her fingers and her toes. I wanted to trace the whorls of her hair. I wanted to feel the static electric buzz of her skin pressed against my skin. I wanted to examine every inch of her body until I was absolutely sure she was real, that she was mine.
“Just a few more minutes now,” the nurse was telling me, her voice low and soothing. “All of this is routine. We’re just going to give her a vitamin K shot and clean her up a bit, and then we’re going to do a few tests to make sure that everything’s working properly. She got here a little earlier than we expected, didn’t she?”
Early? I thought, blinking. Yes, that was true. She was early. Technically, I was only…thirty-five weeks along? Was that right?
And then Dr. Crawford was there, handing me my daughter, and my arms curled around her, protecting her.
She wasn’t too small. She was beautiful. Perfect. She was still crying. Her eyes got lost in the crumpled folds of her face, and her tiny fists were waving around her temples, so angry. I smiled down at her and poked my finger into her fist.
It worked like a spell. Her hand tightened around my finger and she stopped crying. She blinked up at me, those tiny dark eyes not yet able to focus.
“Hi, baby,” I whispered, my arms tightening around her. “I’m your mama. Hi.”
She puckered her lips and stuck out her tongue. Rooting, I thought, remembering the word from a book I read weeks and weeks ago. She was hungry. I reached for my breast.
My daughter lifted her head to search for my nipple, and that’s when I saw the faintest hint of a birthmark just below her chin in the shape of a hand.
* * *
The next eight hours were a blur of too-short periods of intense, dreamless sleep interrupted by sudden flurries of activity: nurses waking me up to check my temperature, my blood pressure, my hydration levels, white lights and noise as strangers strapped a breast pump to my chest and encouraged me to pump.
I found out, somewhere in the middle of this, that Dex had died. The blood loss and the accident were too much for him, and he passed the same night our daughter was born. I wasn’t in a good frame of mind when they told me. There’s this thing that happens after you give birth that people don’t talk about, or at least they don’t talk about enough: all the hormones that have been building in your body for nine months come crashing down at the same time, and it makes you feel like you’re in the darkest, most intense depression of your life. People call this “the baby blues,” which is just so condescending I could scream. The point is, I wasn’t feeling like myself when they told me about Dex, and on top of that, I was numbed out from the exhaustion and the painkillers. I hadn’t known how to make sense of my emotions—it was too much information to take in all at once. I was still so angry with Dex for cheating on me and lying to me and gaslighting me, but he was my husband. I’d thought I was going to spend the next sixty years of my life with him. I’d thought we were going to raise our daughter together. And just like that, he was gone. He hadn’t deserved that, no matter what he did.
And then, of course, there was the baby. My baby. This brand-new life, this enormous responsibility. I still don’t have the words to explain how different I felt, how it was as though my DNA had changed the night my daughter came into this world. And it wasn’t just me I’d needed to explain; it was her. It was the impossible puzzle of her birth. I thought about it constantly, obsessively, trying to find any kind of sense in what happened.
I could still make out the faint imprint of a rash on my legs, but it had mostly faded after I gave birth, its color changing to a muted orange, then a faint, bruised brown. I traced what was left with the tip of my finger, studying it like it was a road map to some distant foreign country.
My doctors all said I must’ve had an allergic reaction to something in my lotion. They said that Dex hurt his hand in the car crash that had killed him. They said my baby was fine. Everything was fine.
I wanted to believe them. There was a part of me that wanted to believe I’d imagined everything, that Dex had been right all along. There are so many hormones in your body when you’re pregnant. They make you think impossible things, believe impossible things. I wanted to believe that I’d gone crazy for a little while, and now that the baby was here, things would go back to normal. And maybe I could’ve made myself believe those things, if I hadn’t started to remember.
A blue baseball cap in the darkness. Rain falling all around me. Flickering candlelight. A bloody hand pressed to my forehead.
I found out later that Siobhan had died the night I gave birth to my daughter too. She’d been rushed to the ER minutes after I’d gone into labor. At the exact moment I was bringing my baby into this world, she’d been taking her last breaths.
Only she hadn’t been in Brooklyn. I didn’t learn this until days later, when the news hit the internet. I was reading an in memoriam piece in Vanity Fair, a gushing account of Siobhan’s incredible career beneath a stunning black and white photograph of her at age twenty-three, when she’d won her first Oscar, when I reached a line that made me pause.
Siobhan passed away at Southampton Hospital, according to a statement released by her family.
I stared, wondering how that could be. Siobhan had died here, just a few halls away from where I’d given birth? How? Why?
I was shaking my head, reading that line again, when I heard Siobhan say, as clearly as though she’d spoken directly into my ear, “I need you to listen to me now.”
The words shuddered through me. I went still, hair rising on the back of my neck. The memory was there, but it was fragile, a single thread that, if tugged too hard, would break and be gone forever.
I remembered rain hitting my face, earth beneath my back. And there’d been chanting. The far-off sound of women chanting.
Then the memory blinked out and I was in the recovery room again. The hospital was quiet around me, nothing but the murmur of distant voices, tennis shoes hitting the hall outside my room at a fast clip. Somewhere, a machine beeped.
Then, to my left, a quick knock, a woman’s voice. “Anna?”
The suddenness shocked me, and some fear response kicked in. I clamped my hand around the threadbare blanket stretched across my lap, my shoulders tightening. But it was Siobhan’s friend from the birthing center, Olympia. She stood outside my room in black jeans and a black sweatshirt, blond hair falling over her forehead and shoulders in soft waves.
“I’m sorry… Is it weird that I came?” Her voice was deep and soothing, the voice of yoga studio teachers and meditation apps. “I was in town, so I brought you something.”
She held up a teddy bear.
I stared, my eyes blurry with exhaustion. It was odd, but I could swear I’d seen her somewhere else very recently. I had this perfect image in my head of her standing in the dark, outside maybe, tucked between trees and shadow, swaying. Then, I blinked, dazed, and the image broke apart.
“I’m sorry,” Olympia said, wrinkling her nose. “It’s probably too early for you to have visitors. I shouldn’t have come.”
“No,” I said, remembering my manners. “No, it’s fine. Come in.”
Olympia entered my room and closed the door behind her. She was a tall woman with narrow shoulders and hips and a finely boned, angular face. She didn’t appear to be wearing a lot of makeup, but her eyebrows were very thick and dark, and she’d lined her lips in a deep brownish mauve. It made her look arresting and dramatic. Her fingernails were long, pointed, painted a very pale pink.
She put the teddy bear she’d brought down on a table with a few of my other gifts and settled herself in the stiff polyester armchair beside my bed. Her movements were languid, like a house cat.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
I felt like I’d sat cross-legged on a stick of dynamite. The good painkillers had worn off, and I was back to Tylenol which—as far as I could tell—did nothing. I was terrified to use the bathroom, to sit up, to try to put on pants. The only thing that had helped at all was a cooling spray that came in a small aerosol can, like hairspray. I’d already used up half the bottle.
But that’s not the answer you’re supposed to give when you’ve just had a baby, so I said, “I’m good. Tired. It’s hard to sleep in a hospital, with the nurses checking in every hour. Not that I’m expecting to get much sleep for the next few months.”
“No, I don’t imagine you will.” Olympia offered me a small smile. “All those night feedings, just you and her.” She looked around, her smile wavering. “Where is…?”
“A nurse took her for a bath. She’ll be back soon.” I sat up straighter, accidently knocking a pillow off my bed. “Oh—”
“I got it.” Olympia plucked the pillow from the floor, and as she leaned past me, I caught a scent off her hair. It was dark and woodsy, cool night air and smoke.
I stiffened, remembering the sound of women’s voices weaving through the trees. A palm, warm and wet, pressed to my forehead. And something else. Siobhan’s voice, saying something.
What had she said?
My mouth felt suddenly dry. I closed my eyes, my brain struggling to put it all together.
When I opened them again, Olympia was looking at me, an intense look tinged with something else. Curiosity? Expectation?
She said, “You’re starting to remember, aren’t you?”
Candles with fragile, flickering flames. Voices in the trees.
“Something happened that night…” I said, hesitant. It was all so jumbled in my head, half dream, half memory, none of it remotely possible. “The night my baby was born…You…you did something to me.”
Olympia said nothing for a long time. I wondered if she was going to make me beg her for the truth. But then she steepled her fingers and pressed them to her lips and said, her eyes cast toward the floor, “You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to. I can give you something to make sure it all stays forgotten. A lot of women find it easier that way. It’s your choice.”
I felt a tumbling inside of me, a feeling like one domino knocking into another and then another. “Find what easier?” I asked. I’d meant for my voice to sound calm, but a note of anger slipped in. “What did you do to me?”
Olympia lifted her eyes to mine and stared for a moment. I stared right back, wondering what memories were playing in her head, what she could recall of that night that I still could not.
Eventually she said, her words slow and careful, “Siobhan came to us a while ago. She wanted to help you.”
“Help me do what?”
“Conceive.”
The word shuddered through me. I felt like I’d been kicked. “But…how?” I asked. Olympia didn’t answer so I said the thing I’d been thinking for a while, the thing that couldn’t be possible, except for the chanting and candlelight in my memory, the women swaying in the dark. “She wanted you to do a spell.”
A beat, then Olympia nodded.
“You’re witches,” I murmured. My heart was beating fast. “Does that mean you worship the devil?”
“No” Olympia met my eyes. “Our practice is much older than the Christian idea of Satan. Fertility spells are simple. We do small spells like that for women who want that sort of help whenever we can, to make things a little less painful, a little easier. We consider it a public service. We were happy to help you too. But then you miscarried. I answered the phone that night of your miscarriage. I don’t know if you remember, but we spoke for a few minutes. Siobhan was sick. Do you?”
“I remember.”
Olympia scanned my face, her gaze heavy. The harsh overhead lights turned her skin translucent. She looked very young to me all of a sudden, a teenager wearing her mother’s lipstick. “You sounded so scared on the phone, so desperate. I felt for you, and so I authorized another member of our coven to go to you, to perform an ultrasound, to see if there was anything we could do to save the baby.”
I saw a flash of red lipstick, dark hair. My stomach clenched. “Meg.”
“Yes. Meg’s our ultrasound tech; she would’ve told us if the fetus was still viable. But by the time she reached you, we were already too late and the baby was gone. There was nothing that could be done.” Olympia paused. “Not medically, at least. But then you called Siobhan again later that night. You begged her for help. Do you remember? You said you’d do anything.”
Snow flurrying outside my window, and Siobhan’s voice on the other end of the line, raspy and weak.
“Fertility spells are easy,” Olympia continued, “but the kind of spell you were asking for, a spell to bring back someone who died, well, that’s a much different thing.”
That night on the phone, Siobhan asking if there was anything she could do. And me, blurting, my voice choked with tears, Can you get me my baby back?
“But she did it,” I whispered. My voice was a croak. I slid my eyes out of focus until Olympia was just a blur of gold and mauve. I couldn’t look at her, but her voice in my ears was clear and calm.
“We don’t do spells like that for just anyone, you understand,” she said. “Normally, you would’ve had to be vetted and inducted as member of our coven. There’s a process. But Siobhan didn’t think there was time. If she was going to bring your baby back, then the spell would’ve had to be done that very night, as close to the miscarriage as possible. And Siobhan wanted to help you.” Olympia’s voice softened. “She loved you, you know. She thought of you like a sister, like family. I think that’s why she decided to do it, knowing it was against our rules, knowing what it was going to cost her.”
My head came up. “Cost her?”
“It took an enormous amount of energy to work that spell. And Siobhan was already sick. She collapsed immediately after she was done.”
I saw it. Siobhan curled on the floor of her apartment, fighting for her life, at the exact same moment that I was lying on my back in the basement, watching my belly move. It hadn’t been a coincidence at all.
“We all knew what she had done immediately,” Olympia continued. “A spell leaves a trace, and the whole coven felt it. We tried to reach you, but you’d changed your number, moved away. We knew you were staying out here at Talia’s, which was why we were able to get the dolls in place in time, but we couldn’t get close enough to speak to you, not with that bodyguard around.”
I was still struggling to catch up. “The dolls…you put them there?”
“I’m sorry if they scared you. They weren’t meant to. They’re part of a protection spell meant to draw the pain out of your body and tie it to them instead. But then you found them, moved them.” Something in Olympia’s eyes flickered. “I can’t imagine your pregnancy was easy after that. The dolls would’ve helped, just like the herbs in the cookies would’ve helped.”
“You sent the cookies too?” But that didn’t make sense. Emily had sent me those cookies. Dex told me he’d found them in one of her baskets.
Only…he hadn’t said in, had he? He’d said next to. And before that, I thought the cookies had come from Talia. We’d eaten the same ones with her the morning after my miscarriage, and she’d told me a friend had given them to her.
I looked back up at Olympia. “You were the friend who gave Talia those cookies?”
Olympia nodded. “We’ve been vetting Talia for a while now. We plan to invite her into the coven soon. She knows bits and pieces about who we are, what we do, but I’d appreciate if you didn’t say anything until we were ready to offer her a space with us.”
“But you asked her to bring me those cookies? Why?”
“The cookies contained herbs to still your stomach and keep some of the more horrifying hallucinations at bay. Midwives and herb witches have known about remedies like that for hundreds of years, since long before modern medicine stole the practice away from us. If you’d kept eating them your pregnancy would’ve been easier.” Olympia leaned forward, taking my hand. “It never should’ve been this painful, Anna. I’m so sorry. I wish you hadn’t gone through it alone. The rest of us should’ve been there to help you.”
I pulled my hand away. I wasn’t quite ready to be best friends yet. There was still so much I didn’t understand. “What about Dr. Hill? Cora said she was working with you, that she sold my baby to you. And Io said you do rituals, satanic rituals.”
Olympia’s face darkened. “Io’s beliefs are the reason she was never asked to join us. For forty years she’s spread harmful propaganda on that channel of hers. She tells lies, saying we worship Satan when Satan has no place in what we do or believe. Her words incite violence against us.”
“As for Dr. Hill…we pay her for information, yes, but she’s just a means to an end. She helps us find people who might need us, desperate people, people who the medical system ignores. But I’m afraid we could never allow her to join us either.”
“But she tried to help me.”
Olympia blinked at me. “Did she? Or did she ignore you when what you were saying wasn’t convenient? Dr. Hill might have personally meant you no harm, but she’s part of a system that regularly ignores women and other marginalized people. Think about it, Anna. Did Dr. Hill listen to you when you told her you were in pain? Have any of your doctors listened to you?”
I swallowed and looked away from her, worried I might start to cry. All this time, I’d felt betrayed by the doctors who’d insisted they could find no medical reason I shouldn’t be able to get pregnant, the doctors who’d made me feel like I was the one who’d failed because I’d waited too long. I thought of my miscarriage, blood on the tile, my baby leaving my body, and I heard Dr. Crawford telling me he had no idea why it had happened. I remembered all the times I’d gone to Dr. Hill looking for something to help alleviate the pain of IVF, only to be told to take an aspirin, to be strong, that it wouldn’t be so bad. Even as the pain made it so I couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk, couldn’t think.
