Immaculate, page 11
How could the War of the Roses or the limits and infinitesimals of calculus possibly rank on the priority list? No matter the exact cause or the exact reasons behind it all, I knew that this baby was more important than getting straight As—becoming a mom was more important than becoming the valedictorian. Because who was I in all this? Who was I in comparison to the life I was carrying?
I was a vessel, a mode of transportation, a way for this child to get from one place to the next, one world to another. I was a human incubator, a machine that just happened to have lungs and a brain and a beating heart.
Did all soon-to-be mothers feel this? All of them who had conceived in the normal way? Whether it was intentional or a slip, whether it was a one-night stand or a loving husband, a defective condom or a perfectly laid-out plan—did every pregnant woman feel as if she had suddenly stopped existing as an individual? That she had handed over the keys to her independence the moment she decided to keep the baby? I couldn’t imagine not feeling this way because, really, when it came down to it—wasn’t every baby its own kind of miracle? Just because science could explain the hows and whys of reproduction didn’t make it any less amazing that a sperm met an egg and nine months later a living, breathing baby was born. My hows and whys were unusual, yes, but maybe the end result was the same.
I liked this, the idea that I wasn’t the first or last new mom to feel this way—so selfless and humbled in the face of something much bigger than I was.
My baby was, according to my reading, roughly five ounces, five inches long that week, or about the size of an onion or a small potato—for whatever reason, every pregnancy source liked to compare the fetus size to fruits and vegetables, though there was nothing particularly cute to me about measuring my baby against a lumpy brown root vegetable. She or he was just beginning to start forming body fat, rubbery cartilage was turning into bone, and tiny ear bones were developing, which meant that maybe, just maybe, my voice was being heard. Was becoming familiar, even. Little eyes had moved to the front of the face, complete with eyebrows and eyelashes—eyes that could now sense light and make small side-to-side movements. Eyes that would maybe look just like mine, wide and blue and relentlessly curious. She or he could wiggle fingers and toes, and sometimes, if I closed my eyes and really focused on the inside of my body, I swore I could feel the movements.
Those were the facts that really mattered. Those were the details I needed to be learning and absorbing every spare minute I could find.
But pregnancy books weren’t the only books I was fixated on. I’d slipped into the church library two Sundays before—my first and only time there since it had all began—and taken out as many books as I could find about miracles in general and about Mary and the Immaculate Conception—which, contrary to what I’d spent my whole life assuming, was a doctrine concerning Mary’s mother’s conception of her, not Mary’s conception of Jesus. It was Mary who was born free of any original sin, free of all stains and blemishes—blessed with the purifying grace normally conferred in baptism. From the moment she was born, from the very beginning of her life, Mary had already been chosen.
And what about me? When had this become my fate? My path to stumble down?
I was desperate, ravenous for clues. I’d pored over the books, searching for whatever slivers of insight I could find. I’d read and reread different translations of each passage in the Bible that centered around Mary—the conception, her fateful meeting with Gabriel, the reactions of the people who loved her. But I kept coming back to Luke, the passage that was most familiar to me:
In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the House of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.
But what did Mary really think after the angel just up and departed, vanished back into thin, heavenly air? I wanted to read about her struggles, her shock, her disbelief—that she was “much perplexed” didn’t quite cut it for me. I wanted thoughts and feelings that would make her real and three-dimensional, a human being rather than a character meant to impart some kind of lesson in faith and obedience.
After I exhausted the relevant Bible passages, I started reading about miracles across the centuries, across religions, and across the globe, the history of the beliefs and the history of the word miracle itself. Miracle—mir-a-cle—a mid-twelfth-century Middle English word derived from the Old French miracle; from Latin miraculum, “object of wonder”; from mirari, “to wonder at”; and from mirus, “wonderful.” Mary, it turns out, wasn’t even the first symbol of miraculous birth to be found in historical and religious literature—the idea of divine conception had been around long before her, in Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Japanese, Greco-Roman and Hellenistic mythologies, Hinduism, and Buddhism. There were commonalities laced throughout all of these ancient belief systems—deities emerging through physically impossible conceptions, and the inexplicable nature of divinity itself.
But why is this a narrative that human beings keep latching onto, keep grasping at as truth, as proof of some supreme being? Why did the divine need a womb at all, really? Why not just spring out of the ground, or fall from the sky? Materialize out of nothing and nowhere?
I kept hoping that something would jump out at me from a page, a word or an image, some cryptic message that would somehow illuminate everything I was going through. But so far—nothing. I wasn’t closer to any sort of explanation than I’d been in August, staring at those damn pee sticks in the woods.
I grabbed my English notebook from the rubble pile and flipped open the front cover. An essay with a big red C stared up at me, and I quickly jammed it in the back pages where I could at least temporarily pretend it didn’t exist. It was my first C in the history of my education, and in English of all classes, my strongest subject. My favorite subject. Reading and writing had always just come so naturally to me, so effortlessly, like breathing and walking and eating. English was the only college major I had ever seriously considered, the only future I could picture for myself. Teaching, editing, writing—anything that involved words on paper, thoughts pinned down in black and white.
But now I had proof that I couldn’t even count on a guaranteed A in English, not if I planned on doing nothing to really earn it. This particular essay had been the first of the school year, written about The Scarlet Letter, appropriately enough—an analysis of knowledge, sin, and the human condition. One would think I’d have excelled at the topic, but the C seemed to say otherwise. I had already read the book on my own two years earlier, so I’d figured it was reasonable to rely on online summaries and critiques the second time around. I’d been so proud the week before when I’d managed to cobble together the entire paper in less than three hours. Safe to say, all pride had vanished.
I felt as if I should care more than I did. I should care enough to beg the teacher for a redo. I should care enough to start reading the copy of Heart of Darkness, the next book on our list, that was sitting on my nightstand. I should care—but I didn’t. I was scared of what my parents would say if they knew, and of what other students would think about my stunning fall from the top. But when it came down to me and what I really felt, the part of me that had held so much stress and ambition and fear about school . . . that place now just felt hollow. Perfect grades had lost their power over me. Grades couldn’t define me anymore. It was petrifying, all of a sudden existing without the clear spectrum of success that I’d held myself up to for the last twelve years. Grades made it easy to label yourself: As meant you were a success, you were smart and capable and in control. Cs meant you were mediocre. You needed to study longer, try harder.
I was on my own now, with no clearly set marks to validate my progress. Real life didn’t quite work like that, I was learning. Real life seemed much more pass or fail to me.
I sighed and tossed my English notes back in the heap. Tomorrow would be Friday, and then I’d have the whole weekend to catch up. I would make to-do lists for each of my classes and systematically cross off each assignment, one by one, powering through all of Saturday night if I had to. I’d worked too hard for too many years to ruin it all so close to the end. I didn’t need all As, but I still needed to pass. I still needed to get into college. As soon as the most urgent schoolwork was done, I’d go back to the applications. Reassess, reevaluate. Come up with a new, more functional plan of attack. A plan that somehow figured in caring for and supporting a tiny, helpless, fatherless baby on my own.
I sat down at my desk in front of the computer, scanning mindlessly through a few e-mails before my fingers typed in modern-day miracle on autopilot. I’d searched slightly different combinations and variations of the same words almost every day, hoping each time that I’d find a story I’d somehow missed before, some hint that even one other person in the entire world had experienced something remotely similar—that genuine miracles were happening if people were open and willing enough to believe.
There were the standard stories about miraculous healing, and who was to say what really happened in those cases? Amazing genius doctors and brain-numbingly innovative medications and procedures? Pure and simple good luck? The human body could perform some pretty spectacular, awe-inspiring feats sometimes—that much seemed inarguable. But the spontaneous growth of a baby sans sexual reproduction? That would be a first—or a second, depending on who you asked.
A knock at the door made me jump.
“Mina?” my mom called out from the hallway, her voice low and tentative. Before this had all happened, she would have opened the door without giving me the chance to respond, the knock more on principle, an alert rather than an actual question. But privacy lines had changed. My life inside my room was suddenly much more my own, my one free space to think and cry and breathe.
“You can come in, Mom,” I said, closing the window on my computer screen and turning in my seat to face her. She stepped in and shut the door, glancing at me briefly before looking away, her eyes twitchy and unfocused.
“What’s up?” I asked, nervous because she was nervous. Her anxiety was contagious. “Is there something you want to talk about?”
She nodded as she perched herself on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been wanting to talk about this ever since . . . well, ever since we found out the news. But I also wanted to give you time to think on it by yourself, to come to your own decisions. I didn’t want to push you.” She paused, and we both stared down at her hands, her fingers spinning her thick band of bracelets in jangling circles around her wrist. “The thing is, sweetheart, you’re going to be showing any day now. To be honest, this morning at breakfast I thought I noticed a bump for the first time. A very small bump, but this is just the beginning. It’s only a matter of weeks, maybe even days, before people start to talk. Before they start to ask questions. And I just want to know that you’re prepared to give them some sort of answer. Now, I will fully support you on whatever answer you want to give—that’s your decision—but I don’t want you to be caught off guard when it does happen. And it will happen.” She exhaled for what seemed like the first time since she’d walked into the room, her face flushed from the exertion of pushing it all out.
“It’s not as if I haven’t been thinking about this, Mom. Trust me,” I said, my voice shaking. “I’ve gone over it so many times in my head, played through every sort of answer I could give. No one will believe that I’m a virgin if my own dad and boyfriend and best friend can’t even have that sort of faith in me. But I don’t want people to think that I cheated on Nate. I don’t want people to think there’s a random daddy running around out there, some kind of meaningless one-night stand. How do I win, Mom? How do I make people hate me the least? Because that’s the best I can hope for.”
My mom kneeled next to my chair, wrapping her arms around me. She burrowed against my chest, not bothered by my tears streaming down through her hair.
“We’ll give it a few more days, Mina. We’ll both think about this over the weekend. We’ll come up with something. I know we will, Mina. We will.”
I wanted to believe her. She was my mom—she had always been able to solve every problem, to make everything wrong become right again. But this time I wasn’t so sure. Because this time, a solution might not exist.
Not without another miracle.
• • •
I couldn’t fall asleep after that, not as I kept replaying what my mom had said, brainstorming one impossibly lame explanation after another. At midnight I gave up and kicked off my blankets, quietly making my way down to the kitchen to heat up a glass of milk on the stove. I hadn’t resorted to that since I was little, afraid of monsters and ghosts and every little sound that came out of an old house at night, and it was always Mom or Dad heating the milk up then. It had worked, though, every time, whether it was the milk itself or just the idea of it that made it so effective. The warm mug cupped in my hands, the warm milk against my throat—I barely had time to swallow the last sip before I’d be passed out on top of the pillows.
As soon as I stepped into the kitchen, before I even flicked on the light, I realized that I wasn’t alone. My dad was sitting in a chair by the window, his silhouette dark and hazy against the backdrop of pale moonlight. I jumped in surprise, my hand smacking against the doorframe behind me as I started to spin back around. My dad started, his chair scraping against the tile floor as he stood.
“Mina?” he asked, his face turning toward me, though I couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said, backing away toward the hallway. “I just wanted some warm milk. I couldn’t sleep, and I remembered how well that used to work when I was a kid.”
“No, it’s fine. Don’t leave,” he said, his voice sounding too tired and worn to hold any of his anger right now. “I was actually down here doing the same thing. The pot’s still on the stove. Sit down. I’ll heat it up for you.” He pushed his chair forward, motioning me toward it.
“No, it’s fine. I can make it,” I said, starting toward the stove.
“Sit down, Mina. I got it.” The gruffness I was used to hearing lately was back, and I was too exhausted to fight it. I sat down as he grabbed the milk carton and flipped on the small light over the stove, leaving the room still mostly in darkness. It was better that way, I thought, easier not to be able to see each other in too much light. I waited for him to say something, anything, but he didn’t. I listened instead to the tap of the wooden spoon as he stirred in slow, careful circles so that the milk wouldn’t scald at the bottom of the pot. I watched as he stuck the tip of his finger into the milk, cocked his head, and stirred for another minute or so before testing the temperature again and then, deciding it was just right, poured it into the same mug he’d used. He clicked off the burner, walked over to me, and handed me the mug.
“I hope this helps,” he said, his eyes looking out the window just behind me. “Good night, Mina.”
I wanted us to say so much more, but I just nodded as I took the milk, our hands brushing for one precious second.
“Thank you, Dad. Good night.”
I really miss you, I almost said, but the words caught in my throat as he disappeared down the dark hallway. Do you miss me, too?
chapter eight
I woke up the next morning with the sort of grotesquely ballooning eyelids and blotchy cheeks that made it obvious to anyone with eyes that I’d spent most of the previous night wide awake and drowning in tears. That, of course, only added to my fears that everyone was analyzing my every movement, speculating about what devastating secret could possibly be putting me through so much anguish. And so my Friday at school passed, as usual, in a blur of dodging glances in the hallway, head tucked like a defensive linebacker as I sprinted from class to class. I was desperate to avoid Izzy and Nate, and now Arielle Fowler was on that list, too—I could swear she had been staring at me during lunch again. But why? She’d certainly never shown any interest in me before. She’d barely ever acknowledged that I existed at all. What would she be saying now to all her sycophantic cheerleading and drama groupies about me? Just thinking about those cool, calculating blue eyes from across the cafeteria gave me the chills for the rest of the afternoon. The three-o’clock bell that marked the official start to the weekend did little to comfort me, not with a long closing shift at Frankie’s to get through first.
I had considered quitting countless times, probably twenty times a day, give or take a few—throwing in the apron and finding a new job that didn’t involve working in a crowded, claustrophobic room with everyone I’d ever known in the entire community of Green Hill. People staring at me, waiting for me, shouting out my name across the busy restaurant for more ice in their Coke or an extra side of ranch. Leaving would be the easy choice. But I needed to be saving money now, before I was too far along to be on my feet. The tips weren’t a fortune in the grand scheme of things, but they were still much better than nothing, and they were more than I’d make in any new job I could find in Green Hill.
