Megan Williams
Megan Williams is a nonfiction writing student at the University of Pittsburgh. Most recently, her work appears in Hobart, 580Split, and Inlandia.
The Ache
When I walk into a maternity boutique, I smile at the cashier. I run my fingers over a soft yellow blanket. I hold its price tag between two fingers and squint to see the cost. I smile at the stuffed animals, plush rabbits sitting on shelves, waiting to be slobbered on. The cashier does not know I am a murderer.
Once, I bought a dress. Its ruched bodice, black cotton, and shapeless skirt reminded me of something else. A mourning dress disguised as a maternity dress. In the fitting room mirror I stared back at a woman in perpetual sorrow. How strange to sell that heavy garment in such a happy place; the dour dress clashed against the blue wallpaper, the soothing music, the smiling mothers-to-be. They also do not know I am a murderer.
I always go on days when my hair is particularly healthy; when my cheeks are pink and freckled; when my skin is smooth and glowing. These are important markers for young pregnant girls. The look is easy to imitate with a little work: condition, moisturize, exfoliate. I need to look healthy and happy and not like a murderer.
Perhaps the most important requirement for walking into a maternity boutique, though, is aching.
* * *
Once, I was pregnant for ten weeks. I spent those two and a half months scared of my boyfriend, who put that baby inside me without my permission. Without my participation. I recoiled from my body as it changed because of memories my mind didn’t have. I did not go to the doctor. I did not tell my parents. I did not stop drinking. That baby seemed to me a continuation of my boyfriend, an ancestral anchor, something to which he would secure my body and dive, dive, dive until I never saw the sun again.
I did not love my baby until its last few hours of life. My boyfriend threw me to the ground and kicked me so fiercely that my stomach turned purple by the next morning. Through it all, I fought to keep a hand between his foot and my flesh. I screamed for him to stop. I screamed until I couldn’t scream anymore. Until the only noises I made were involuntary moans, wrenched from my chest.
When I woke, he said Good morning, baby and used his foot to grind my jaw into the carpet. I knew that my baby was dying. I went home and collapsed into the bathtub. I waited for the bleeding to start. I did not call an ambulance. I did not tell my parents. Soon, I was covered in the evidence of its death. I crawled on shaking legs to the bathroom cabinet, grabbed the bleach, and mechanically scrubbed the viscera down the drain.
My boyfriend left me for college. I tried not to think of him, and the thing only the two of us knew about, the way we murdered our baby together.
* * *
Three years later, I turned eighteen and gifted myself a gynecologist appointment. I told him a sanitized version of the story: I had a miscarriage with my first boyfriend, I didn’t even know I was pregnant, it was very early on, I just thought I had a stomachache, I’ve had a very irregular period since.
(As of today: twelve periods in five years.)
They ran a lot of tests. I had to duck out of my job to get bloodwork done, woke up hungry a couple mornings for the more invasive procedures, recited state capitals aloud to avoid thinking about the cool metal being forced inside of me.
I told myself I didn’t care. I kept my ringer off to prove it. The strange habit I’d procured of pretending to be pregnant in stores didn’t portend any actual desire. I would get tested to make sure everything was fine, not that I wanted kids or anything, and then move on.
At my fifth follow-up appointment, the doctor told me that it was unlikely I would ever bear children again.
Again, again, again.
A numbness I’d forgotten crept over me. The same kind of cold that keeps you glued to the bathtub, that suffocates you in the fitting room. He sounded so sad when he told me. I wondered, almost distantly, whether he would have been sad had he known I was a murderer. If he would have placed his cool hand atop mine if he could see it was covered in blood. Would he think this was a higher power’s punishment for my failure? The Gods fashioned me for motherhood; I disemboweled the concept. They responded in kind.
When I left his office, a woman held the door for me with one hand and held her baby in the other. I felt such intense longing that I staggered away from her, into my car. That longing—it burst through me like flowers bloom through cracks in concrete. I felt it settle deep into my bones. I felt it become a part of my genetic makeup, as integral as anything else, an ache, ache, ache.
* * *
When I walk into a maternity boutique, I know I’m going to walk out without buying what I really want. I will never have that for which I long. Not in real life.
I have this dream, though. It started when I turned twenty, the five-year anniversary of my miscarriage.
There’s a small brick cottage with smoke pouring out of the chimney. A vegetable patch stretches out of the grass. The sun is just beginning to rise.
There’s a woman in the window, wearing a long white dress. She flips pancakes and hums Carole King under her breath. She has healthy hair and glowing skin and pink cheeks every day.
She smiles when the floorboards creak. She is not afraid of men stomping towards her. She is not afraid of anything.
Her daughter emerges, sleepy-eyed and yawning, cradling a plush rabbit. She is small and sweet and breathtakingly alive. She smiles like the sun coming up and warmth unspools through every corner of the kitchen.
And the mother says to the daughter—like her boyfriend did so many years before, but unlike it in all the ways that count—Good morning, baby.
And she means it. And she doesn’t ache.