Reproduction by Louisa Hall

Author:Louisa Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

5.

SITTING BY THE playground on the pedestrian mall in Iowa City, remembering that drive out to the desert, I felt a little bit dizzy. As though, in thinking about that trip, I’d gained speed and crossed some barrier in time, a barrier that divided my life now from all the lives I’d led before it, lives I’d led before my husband and I left New York, before Montana, before I’d ever been pregnant. Reeling a little, feeling extraordinarily nauseous, I put one hand on my belly, as though to steady myself. As though to anchor myself in the current moment.

Suddenly, behind me, I heard the whoosh of the splash pad that turned on at nine o’clock. My daughter looked up, made her mouth into an O, the universal human sign for excitement, then dropped the trash she was carrying and ran toward the water.

At the splash pad, she had always been unusually brave. Other children her age needed their parents to hold them and carry them through, or cried at the touch of the fountains, or sidled up, then screamed and ran away as soon as they came into contact with water.

But my daughter simply took a deep breath and ran in. She held her arms over her head. Each time she entered the fountain, you could see the shock of it hit her. You could see her want to scream. And yet, determined, she ran on through the full row of fountains, which towered high over her head, then crashed back, frothing. Nevertheless, she continued running. Then, clear of the fountains, she looped back around, put her arms over her head, and, once again, ran through the whole row.

Every time we went to the splash pad on the ped mall, people stopped on their way out of the market or into the hotel to marvel at my daughter. They laughed and pointed. “She’s so brave,” a woman with graying hair said, standing still and watching her.

She was brave. She had always been brave. It worried me, on occasion, to be the mother of such a brave daughter. What will the world do, I sometimes wondered, in the face of her courage? She was still running in and out of the fountains, and by now the initial joy and surprise had started to fade. The ecstasy of overcoming a shock had subsided, replaced, now, by a certain commitment. She seemed to be feeling the rhythm of the work she had committed to: the cold and the wet and the brightness of the sun on the water, her clothes soaked and clinging, her little Crocs pounding the pavement.

It was impossible to imagine that there had ever been a time when she didn’t exist. No. There was no time when she didn’t. And yet, only three years ago, in the fall of 2018, the last time I’d seen Anna, she hadn’t been conceived yet. I was in Montana then, and pregnant with another baby, when Anna came to visit me. She’d brought

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