Tebah pulled the cord on bus 58, signaling the driver to stop. Nine years ago to the day she’d learned she was pregnant. A block from Kostner Avenue on Chicago’s west side, she got off, pushing through the crowd but not through her thoughts. She walked back to the house after work as if walking into wind. She sat on the porch and braced her chin on the heels of her hands, fingers pressed hard against eye sockets. Rewarded with pain, she waited for its claws to snag memories, wiping her lids with the repetitive pacing of a zoo tiger—a nightly ritual looping through years of captivity. She furrowed into the crevasses of her tear ducts, fingers seeking the ridge of bone above her nose and pictured the hole the cartilage would leave when it crumbled. She would go into the house. Did so every day. Otherwise, people would talk. Her hands dropped to the porch step as she prepared to stand. She couldn’t. She lifted a hand back to her head, stretched it over both eyes. Thumb on one temple, fingers gripping the other, she squeezed her skull. Not enough.
Sitting there on the usual step, she remembered how easy it had been in the beginning, the hope of new procedures. Everything full of promise. Flat on her back, feet in stirrups, holding Jack’s hand, Tebah had peered between her knees as the technician determined if there was anything viable. There were two. In the majesty of life’s expression, Tebah had been whole—in maternal rapture, the mother of Moses with the covenant.
“You’re in luck, folks,” the technician had said. “By the miracle of mitosis, you’re gonna need two strollers. Twins! One embryo is exceptionally well formed.”
Tebah had grown accustomed to the vocabulary but imagined them as two flat wafers, tablets of the covenant, as she lay her head back and closed her eyes.
“Does that mean one is more likely to survive?” Jack had asked.
“Nah, one is just quicker off the draw than the other. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to step outside now, sir.”
Jack had squeezed Tebah’s shoulder as he stepped away, the door hissing closed behind him.
“Breathe slowly and deeply and don’t try to help me,” the technician had instructed. “This won’t take long.”
Tebah had focused on the suspended ceiling, on the little holes in the faintly uneven white surface, each panel framed in white metal. Prodded from the inside, her bones slid up inside the sleeve of her skin. The technician pushed harder, jabbing at some unknown barrier. She had counted the white holes as he worked, accepting the abuse of well-meaning things, willing her body receptive. White holes were counted until they blurred, the light in the center of the panel to the left twinkling in watery eyes.
“I’m going to withdraw now, but stay relaxed. You’re doing very well. And whatever you do, don’t lift your head or move.”
For two hours, with Jack outside in the waiting room, she had lain there. She made herself into a vessel, breathing shallow and slow for fear of disrupting the life inside her. The pinpoints of pain subsided, and she imagined her essence encircling those tablets to comfort and calm them. She sensed herself in the plural, recipient of the future, never alone anymore. She offered love in return.
Her communion was interrupted by snapping latex. “OK, ma’am, that’ll do ‘er. You can get dressed now,” the technician had said as he pulled off his gloves.
“Is it alright to go to the toilet?”
“Yes, it’s just over there. Then you’re done and dusted!”
Tebah inched her feet to the edge of the hospital bed, letting the weight of her legs sliding to the floor pull her upright without tensing. She walked the four steps to the toilet and felt the embarrassment of liquid draining out of her like seminal fluid with no place else to go. The faith that it was ointment allowed her to breathe. Surely they would have something here to wash away any stains. She pivoted carefully and sat to empty her bladder. A wrong sort of warmth made her look down. Blood, bright and insulting, splashed across her inner thighs, thick with corpulent globs of burgundy-black. She didn’t contract a single muscle in her disappointment. Hope made her pull on the emergency cord.
The blood had only been the remnants of the technician’s manipulations. Tebah was blessed with twins. The feeling of plenitude that fills a mother in the first months of carrying her children was proof of the union with those now indelibly attached to her. She knew what it was like not to need, not to be alone, and she knew as all new lovers do that it was the beginning of forever. Initiated into a collective abundance that, for Tebah, separates women from men, she smiled at Jack’s attempts to understand.
In the first week of the fifth month the ultrasound was abnormal. They told her that for reasons nobody really understood one of her children had stopped growing. As the other expanded, its ever-increasing needs pulled fluid from the more delicate twin’s tissues. Its increasing mass weighed on its less substantial life-mate, compressing it.
“That fuzzy bit there is the fetus papyraceus,” the technician had said as he pointed to the screen, and indeed on the later ultrasounds it looked like a fetus-shaped balloon with all the air leaked out. A parchment child.
“Some people call it Vanishing Twin Syndrome,” he had said. “The other baby will be fine.”
Tebah called it sin. One tablet was broken and the other, by its desecration of the first, had profaned itself. Tebah was still pregnant but only in the purest physical sense was she not alone. The trinity that had given her faith to step into the unknown, to know a love that did not need her shame, did not whisper “if only you were more,” was gone. She broke into unfixable pieces of oneness: one embittered spouse, one to hide dirty laundry, one to execute the motions of motherhood. A highwire act with no balancing pole, fighting the beast in her belly to stay upright, she listened to the carnival barker’s call to come see the fall.
The parchment child blocked her cervix, so Tebah was emptied of Ana by cesarean and was in bed for weeks following the complicated delivery. As with many children of the non-vanishing kind, Ana also had complications. When her twin had shriveled, Ana’s body had recycled it, accommodating its contents in her own. Although she had no paralysis, doctors said she could well face disturbances of sensation and perception. Born with a lesion on the crown of her head at her soft spot, Ana had a scar there that would cause her to part her hair in a particular way all her life.
The technicians had requested the placenta as a surgical specimen. It was fixed in 10% neutral buffered formalin, sliced and embedded in paraffin wax. Clinical notes recorded it was delivered as a single disk with a fetus papyraceus attached which exhibited an elementary heart (black arrow in photo), an unformed eye (white arrow), and a trivascular umbilical cord coiling tree-like from a twisted trunk into spreading branches.
The porch step, cold and pragmatic, insisted that Tebah stand up, but she wasn’t ready. Head in hand, she stretched the skin of her forehead with her fingers, seeking a better pain. She had thought at the time, and she thought now, that it was just like those stories about shark pups that eat each other in the womb. Bitterly cold, she gave in. Tightening the knot of her scarf, she stood, turning toward the door of her prison. She glanced at her watch as she turned the knob. It was time to make dinner. Ana would be hungry.
Dea-Anne D’Amico is a writer and photographer. Her recent novel is about a con man who teaches a young girl with synesthesia how the world works. It never works the same for either of them. Dea-Anne’s photographs of monarch butterflies overwintering in the forests of central Mexico are currently on display in Geneva, Switzerland.