A Storybook Ending by Emily Madison

cw: pregnancy loss

My mom had one miscarriage before me, and three (four? five?) after me. She named every one of them, even the last one, which happened with her second husband when she was 46 years old. It only lasted a few weeks, and then she miscarried during marathon training. They named him Josiah. The one before me, Katie. The two in the middle MiKayla and Griffin. Last week, when scrolling the Muncie Animal Rescue Fund page, I stumbled upon a listing for a tiny Siamese kitten named Griffin. I screenshot the listing and sent it to my mother. She hearted the picture. Our small way of remembering.

I didn’t name the one I didn’t have because in my head, when I have my first one, it’ll simply be that one, just reincarnated.

***

The day I took the first pill, the pill that stops the baby from growing, I was working in the writing center. When my shift ended, I walked out to my car. On the passenger seat was the nondescript manila envelope that hid the pills. It was so nondescript, I semi-feared what I would be taking.

The metered lot was full of other cars. I sat in the driver’s seat, about to go home and take it, when I realized that if I moved another muscle, if I went to a secondary location, if I gave myself any more time to think, if I had any time to process, if I had to exist one more moment and feel the imagined flutter in my tummy, I would never do it. I would flush them down the toilet or bury them in the woods somewhere, maybe at Westside Park, for someone else to find the remains. So I had to do it then. Shrouded by vehicles.

I tore open the envelope and out poured paper directions and aftercare tips and two pill bottles. I took out my phone and Googled to make sure I was taking the right one. In the right order. And how many. And what would happen to me. And how soon it would happen. Would I have time to drive home first? Would I even feel it? Would I have to reckon with what I’d done? I read and read, on Reddit, on Quora, whose contributors know better, grittier than any expert, before opening the bottle.

There was no choice. That is what I told myself. There was no other option but to take it, and I had to do it now or else I wouldn’t, and I had to. I just did. It didn’t make sense because I didn’t give myself time to make it make sense. There was no time. And my brain, working 1,000 miles a minute, would come up with reasons and solutions I didn’t have time for. Because six weeks would turn to seven. Because time always passes, keeps passing. So I dropped a small, white, diamond-shaped pill in my hand and put it in my mouth and tasted something so foul, I needed a chaser.

Before I knew it, it was down. And it was done. I was grateful for the time you had had. I was grateful for UPS Express Shipping, which gave me three days to pretend. Gave me three days to read forums with other recently expecting mothers with children to be born on the same due date. Gave me three days to take a “bump pic” in the mirror. And pretend. Pretend the positives were a good thing. Pretend I was years from now, when it would all make sense, and I could let myself be happy.

***

I am supposed to admit I was reckless. No condoms, no birth control. I am supposed to claim guilt somehow, or not feel too bad because I did it to myself. Which is true. But still, still, I have this debilitating fear. I am riddled with anxiety. I have this nightmare that it will never happen again and we had one chance. I have this temptation to keep trying, keep trying, waiting for something to catch, to capture it before it slips away, like a butterfly, or a picture of a cryptid. Before it is only something imagined, something elusive.

***

There is a movie on Netflix featuring Samuel L. Jackson, a contract killer. In the movie, he kills other people’s kids to save his own. In the movie, he is both valiant and cruel, brutally understanding of the world, better than the rest of us for the sacrifice he makes. It is simple. No one wants to kill children. No one wants dead babies. But if it’s between yours or theirs, there is a choice to be made. And what kind of father would you be? What kind of a person? What do you value?

I have learned that I am lacking in some way, not capable of comprehending. When I see the child on the screen, I yell, “don’t shoot!” I understand the movie. I understand what is at stake for Samuel L. Jackson. Either he kills a terrorist’s innocent children, or his children die in a nuclear bomb created by the terrorist. The only way the terrorist will give up the location of the bomb is to threaten him with the deaths of his children.

***

It was illegal in that state. There were posts on every platform about search engines being monitored, search histories scoured for any signs of babies existing, then not existing, trackers on period apps catching anyone with a period more than a week late. Watching for the next period to be logged. Waiting for it to either make sense or not make sense. Cataloging the symptoms typed in notes boxes. I was terrified, as there was a woman just a few states away tried for murder for doing the same exact thing I did. Another had simply sent an email, and there it was: conspiracy to commit the act. I knew other people who had searched the same things out of pure curiosity, and I thought if I worded my searches in an innocent way, scrubbed the fear from them, the guilt, the sadness, that maybe the people monitoring would see me for the student I was.

I only went so many days using the incognito tab before I started to care about nothing. Before I became so frantic, I felt like the world could see everything anyway, and I was so desperate to understand, to be understood, that in the middle of most nights, all I could do was open the Google app and search. How long does it take. Embryos at six weeks. Do six week old embryos have eyes. What does it feel like. What if I stay pregnant. What if I never get pregnant again. I needed my fear to matriculate. Like a stain on my search bar, like a scar. I felt that maybe, if they saw my guilt, saw how hard it was, saw that there was no choice, that I would never do it again, that I would be a good mother someday, they would take pity on me and pretend not to notice. Let the searches float away into the abyss, with either no name attached, or many names.

***

To the clinics at which I made appointments in fear the pills wouldn’t work: thank you for showing me mercy. Thank you for letting the appointment time tick by and not messaging, not calling. Perhaps you thought I changed my mind. Perhaps you think now, as I’m writing this, that I am seven months pregnant. Perhaps you smiled, or maybe mourned the loss of business. Of the 800 and some dollars charge. Thank you for not calling to confirm, for not calling to reschedule. For not demanding partial payment for the time slot. Thank you for your grace when I called, days after I had taken the pills, one day before I started to bleed. Thank you for deciphering the terror and not asking questions.

***

I was going to tell no one, except my goddamn eyes leaked during The Purge: Election Year and fucked up my plan. I wanted to spare anyone else the pain and guilt of living with what I’d done. The burden of decision, the burden of the wreckage. I wanted it to be all mine. I wanted to preserve and protect him, my person, the father, from having to contemplate and inevitably decide. The decision being whether to do the logical thing and “wait for our time,” or to lead with the heart. Sometimes I wonder what he would’ve done if he were given the choice. If I had allowed him the choice. I wonder what he would have said. In the moment, the moment I decided to do it myself, I feared his logic would be so clinical, so unnerving, calm, like a sniper poised trigger-ready on a roof, like a soldier, listening only to the sounds of his own heartbeat, that it would make me sick.

At least I knew myself enough to know that the choice to be logical was so difficult and complicated and immense that I had to remove the options. I feared that his eyes would be clinical and I’d never see him the same loving way I had up to that point. I feared I was wrong about him. I also feared I was right. That he would toil and grieve. That he would have to imagine what it looked like, and what it could be. I was scared he would feel what I had when I found out: a momentary euphoria followed by inevitable, deep-seated dread.

I didn’t want that for us. For him. I needed it to be clean and easy. I needed us to stay the same. I didn’t want to muddy our perfect, fairy tale, storybook waters with the consequences of our reckless, curious, eager actions.

But I just had to fucking cry moments after he pressed play. It was like any other night: we were sitting on his beige couch, blue bowl full of Buldak spicy ramen awaiting us. One single large spoon for us to share. We were continuing the saga of movies we had started days prior. It was like any other night except on that one, I had taken the pill, Mifepristone, just hours before. And according to Google, then, right then, was when I should start to notice. Tangibly notice the stunting of growth. Notice that I was pregnant just in time not to be. His wide eyes watching me, hugging me, not understanding, thinking maybe I was scared, maybe my writing center shift had kicked the shit out of me, drained me mentally, as it usually did. Before he even asked why, he consoled. Crying was just a thing I did sometimes, and he had signed up for that. He held me close, lugged my body on top. He didn’t understand the weight.

He had murdered others, as an Army soldier, but I couldn’t let him murder ours.

He is convinced he is Samuel L. Jackson, with the cool, big guns and dark sunglasses. He would kill out of necessity. For us, to protect ours, he said. It is just a thing people have to do. He had never killed children, he said. Not once. One time, when he was still in service, a child had been sent into a town square, strapped with god knows what. He had the choice. Shoot him, kill him. Lure him away from town and kill him in a spot not so crowded with townspeople so that when the bomb strapped to his small body went off, there would be minimal casualties. There is honor in that, he was told. No casualties except one. It all made so much goddamn sense. Except he saw the small, crying face, he said. The nose. The eyes. So he waited. Finger poised. Listening to the sounds of his own heartbeat. The child would die soon enough, without him having to move a muscle.

***

I never asked my mother if she named the child she chose not to have. The thought never even crossed my mind. Maybe, as her firstborn, I am a culmination of all the ones that came before me.

***

I kept opening my mouth but the words wouldn’t come out. I swear, I tried. I would get so close to the edge and not jump. He got mad. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. If I told him, he could fix it, he said. It was so obvious, black and white.

Finally, we lay in his bed. My face in the crook of his neck, hand on his chest. He’d gotten so mad he was now weary. I was weary. I wanted to just say the words.

“It doesn’t matter anymore because I took care of it, but for a brief moment, for a few weeks…”

“Bambi, are you pregnant?”

Was. Was.

Still was, at that moment. The effects of the first medicine not instantaneous, not a medical abortion. In some cases, and in fact, in my sister’s case, the taking of Mifepristone itself does not result in miscarriage. Alone, it may not even result in anything at all.

There is a 23% chance the embryo lives after taking Mifepristone. Normally, in most cases, the embryo is so small that stopping its progression stops its existence all together. Some children go by unaffected, continue to grow normally, and are birthed without anomaly. As was the case with my sister and her perfect son, with a button nose and fluff of red hair. Perfectly proportioned, tall for his small age, lean and muscular.

We lay in bed for several hours as I cried, and he stared at the ceiling. There had never been a thing half-him before. You don’t know what it’s like until it happens. Once you know, you can never unknow. The feeling of having created something as real as yourself. Something with your large eyes, large nose, Scandinavian brows. For a moment, for a terrible, terrible moment, he was happy. The euphoria flashed through his eyes, I saw it. They were glowing vibrantly, even in the unlit room. Even through the dark of night. The feeling we deserved to feel, how we should’ve felt, we both felt, for but a moment, until the rest of my words caught up with him and he knew it was on its way out. Still, though. Still. For a few hours, we got to lay, knowing. Feeling. Pretending. Pretending we were the people we could only be years from then.

We took a picture with one of the tests I took. To pretend. “This is what it will be like when we find out you’re pregnant.” We smiled and each formed half a heart with our hands over the thick, black text of “Pregnant” on the test screen. We took a selfie as mom and dad.

Then we waited through the night, half-wake, half-sleep, until the next day, when I would have to take the next round of pills that initiated expulsion.

I decided then that it was a miscarriage. That is what abortions are: spontaneous miscarriages. We simply had a miscarriage.