And Again by Jessica Chiarella

Author:Jessica Chiarella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Linda

I don’t know if it’s because everything already feels so strange in my new body, as if I’m being constantly bombarded by a deluge of vivid sensation, but I know immediately that I’m pregnant. It’s a strange feeling, to wake up one morning and know that my new body has become a fertile patch of earth in which something tiny has taken root. I imagine I can feel it already, whatever it is, a tiny goldfish swimming inside me, the flutter of a moth trapped under a drinking glass. I know it even before the symptoms come, days later, when the smell of Tom’s aftershave has me heaving into our toilet. When I resurface he’s grinning so wide, and I feel so heartily terrible that I want to smack him as he leans his face, with its cloying aftershave fumes, close to kiss me. I’m back at the toilet before we have the chance to celebrate.

I was never this sick when I had Jack or Katie. Tom and I didn’t realize I was pregnant with Katie until almost the end of my first trimester. We were in college, and it wasn’t unusual for my periods to come and go when I trained too hard for the cross-country team or in the months leading up to finals. To this day I’m still dumbfounded at how healthy Katie is, considering the diet of protein bars and sports drinks and domestic beer I thrived on back then. But this time I’m nearly crippled by it, the sickness, spending hours chewing dusty saltines as I sit on the edge of our bathtub, staring at the toilet like a well-known adversary.

I’m not sure whom to tell. Tom is fretting about telling the kids, and has been for days now. He’s probably right to worry; he can see exactly what is going on in his house, how Jack careens between elation that I’m home and naked fear that I will be taken from him. Tom sees that I have nothing to offer the little boy, that I am still unsure how to speak to him or show affection for him or do all of the things that should come naturally to mothers. And Katie is ever-wary of me, keeping her distance, talking around me as if I am not here. As if it were my choice to abandon her at the age of four, when she desperately needed a mother.

But I fear that telling the kids will be nothing compared to what I’m facing. The doctors. The others, Hannah and David and Connie. I feel like I’m betraying them, a little. Leaving them behind, when we were supposed to be in it all together. I’ve never wanted to be the first at anything; I’ve never relished the feeling of being special the way others seem to. I would rather follow a well-trodden path, be part of a crowd. I’ve never been good at blazing trails.

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