As She Grows (25 page)

I wake up hours later, on the floor by a dresser in one of the rooms. There is a couple sleeping in the bed and another guy on the rug a few feet away. My head pounds. I pull my body off the ground and stumble to the washroom, study my puffy, red mouth in the mirror. My hair is matted with dried vomit. I brush my teeth with someone’s toothbrush and gargle with gobs of toothpaste. Without cash for the bus, I have to walk home. I stumble out the front door and down the sidewalk, past perfect little families on their way to church. They are nicely dressed, their proper shoes click-clicking on pavement. I see the parents stare at me from the corners of their eyes, reach protective arms around their innocent children as I pass, drop to my knees and vomit in a bush.

I am relieved to finally reach the group home. My mouth is so dry I think my tongue will crack. Jasmyn comes out the door, just as I walk into the house. As if she were waiting for hours to time this perfectly. “Slut,” she says, brushing past me. “Don’t talk to me.”

“What are you . . . ?” The words seem to evaporate as soon as they hit air.

Jasmyn spins around quickly, her face right up to mine, our noses almost touching. With a clenched jaw she firmly repeats, “I said, don’t talk to me.” Then she turns and storms away.

I enter the house a slut and boyfriend fucker. If Jasmyn is angry at someone in the house, then everyone is angry at her. Staff may
have their house rules, but the residents have a far more effective punishment. I lie down on my bed, clothes still on, hair matted, and wait for my inevitable persecution.

Girls jump on hate here. They fight over scraps of me like vultures to a dead animal. I fuel them. I am ignored, brushed up against. Rooms clear when I enter. If I speak, I am attacked. If I remain silent, I am guilty.

The next morning I sit outside Eric’s office door and wait for him to arrive at work. I can tell from the expression on his face when he sees me that I must look like hell.

“What happened?” he asks, staring down at me, his keys clenched in his fist.

I open my mouth to answer but then my eyes cloud and I start crying. I drop my head into my knees, crying so hard I start to gag and then throw up all over the bottom of my pants. Eric bends down beside me, rests his hand on the back of my head, and holds back my hair until I’m done. Then he waits until I can lift myself up and follow him into his office.

I spend the next two hours with Eric. He cancels all his other appointments for the morning. I sit on the couch, a blanket wrapped tightly around my body. In front of me is a box of Kleenex, a glass of water, and a garbage pail to throw up in. My body is shaking. Stomach muscles ache from crying so hard. If it weren’t for my skin, I think I’d break apart.

I tell Eric everything. Almost everything. Some words spill out of me and others are forced up through my throat. Sometimes Eric leaves to give me privacy to cry, other times he sits silently across from me, patiently holding out Kleenexes as if he were offering peanuts to a squirrel. I tell him about the pregnancy. I tell
him about my birth mother being a fifteen-year-old druggie. I tell him about Mitch in my room that last night at Elsie’s. I tell him about Hayden and about smoking and drinking and about sometimes just wanting to die. I tell him I’m scared.

I strip my mind. I don’t care what truth he knows. I have nothing to hide except the marks on my body. Those I keep for myself. I couldn’t risk him taking those away, because if he did, I’d have nothing.

At first Eric says things he is supposed to say, like, “I encourage you to report this to the police.” And then he says other things he shouldn’t: “Goddamn punk should be castrated.” As he’s speaking, his face gets red and his fists are tight and small bits of saliva collect at the corners of his mouth. He catches me staring, intrigued at his response. His anger makes him human. Faulted. Like me.

He quickly shifts in his chair and returns to his responsible, flattened expression. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

At the end of it all, I sit, exhausted, in a tight ball on his couch, stomach pressed hard into my thighs. I clutch clumps of wet tissues in my hands. My head pounds, my mouth is dry and tight. My eyes burn. I feel cleansed and terrified all at once.

Eric puts his hand on my knee and holds tightly. “We will get through this one layer at a time, Snow.”

“I just want to be told what to do,” I say, completely drained. I have no fight left in me. “I don’t want to think anymore.”

•         •        •

My dreams are about the baby now. No longer overexposed ghostly memories of my mother. Instead, these images are dripping and dark and pungent. I dream of a purplish yellow fetus, floating in liquid in a large jar. It has a bony, prickly spine, bulging head, and tiny curled seahorse body. The jar is on a counter in a lab with test tubes and microscopes, and there are people in long white coats who are staring at crystals through thick goggle-like glasses. My eyes return to the baby, only to find it flailing about, the liquid churning like a stormy ocean. Its hollow mouth gasping up against the glass, drowning. I feel my own lungs fill with fluid. And I yell to the people in the white lab coats to help it, but they ignore me. So I finally lift the heavy sealed bottle and smash it on the floor and the baby splashes out, flipping on the ground like a gasping fish. And I don’t know what to do, so I lift up its slimy body and hold it to my chest. And I sing the only lullaby I know,
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
. . . as it starts to relax and eventually turns blue and stiff in my hands.

“I guess I’ll keep it,” I announce casually as if I were talking about a stray dog or a duplicated gift. Three wide-mouthed youth workers circle around me in the office. Miranda rises to shut the door. The books I stole from the library are spread out in front of me. Staff cautiously await my next move. I could get angry, flip the table, or throw a book. I could say it’s illegal for them to snoop through my room, but what they don’t know is that I left the books where they could find them. Eric gave me the idea. He said it might be easier to break the news that way.

We are quiet for a moment.

“We just can’t believe we didn’t know,” Pat finally says, as if they think I might be lying. As if what’s most disturbing is not that someone in the house is pregnant, but that they didn’t pick up on the signs. They sigh a lot and talk in whispers, as if I’m dying, avoiding any upsetting words. Tell me I have
options,
or
alternatives
, too afraid to say the real word:
adoption
. They tell me
we’ll
take one day at a time, that
we’ll
need to find some community supports, that
we’ll
have to watch
our
diets and stop smoking.

When I leave the room, Miranda follows me, tugs at my sleeve, and whispers,
You know, I was adopted.
When I ask her why she’s whispering, she turns all red and chokes on words.

Staff sends me to a health clinic that same afternoon. I don’t understand why I just can’t wait a day, but they say that I should go as soon as possible, considering my activities. The waiting room stinks of sickness and mothballs and diapers. It is packed with old people and kids running around sneezing and wiping their snotty hands on the chairs.

The doctor seems angry with me the second I walk in the room. Without even raising his eyes from his file folder, he tells me to close the door and sticks a wavering finger out, directing me to climb up on the table. He is old, with grey hair and pale folds of flesh that hang like saggy elephant skin from his face. It’s as if age has drained his body of colour. It gives me shivers. But then he raises his head and I spot two beady blue eyes glimmering through his thick yellowed-glass lenses.

Immediately, he starts to give me quick orders, like hold out your tongue, breathe deep, inhale, exhale. He taps me on the left elbow and tells me to roll up my sleeve so he can check my blood pressure.

I panic. “Can you check my other arm?” I blurt out, knowing that if he says no, I’ll run. A doctor would send me straight to the mental hospital if he saw my cuts. He motions that he doesn’t care which arm I pick, and so I reposition myself on the examining table and offer him my unscarred right arm.

“Well, you seem healthy enough. What’s the problem?” he finally asks.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“Is that why you’re here?” He looks up at me. I see that it’s not only his glasses, but the whites of his eyes are yellow too.

“Yes.”

He looks down to his file folder. “They didn’t write it down,” he mumbles, irritated. “Why didn’t you say?” The man is looking at me as if I were an idiot.

“You didn’t ask.”

He sighs, puts away his stethoscope, and leans back against the counter. “Any symptoms?”

“No.”

“No upset stomach? Breast tenderness? Headaches? Constipation?”

“No,” I lie, thinking maybe he’ll just send me away.

“When was your last period?” He positions his pencil to write the date down.

“I’m not sure.”

“Come on, now, you’ve got to know. It’s important.”

“But I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“I don’t know. Probably about six months ago,” I say, shrugging my shoulders.

I’m surprised to see colour actually leak into his face. “And you haven’t seen a doctor?” I shake my head. “We’ll have to get going then. You’re young and healthy. Everything should be fine. I’ll just check your tummy. You’ll need an ultrasound appointment to check dates and make sure there are no anatomical problems.” He doesn’t ask me the things other people do. Like
how come you waited so long
or
how could you not know you were pregnant,
or
what did you think,
it would just go away?
Instead he asks me, “Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Drink?”

“No,” I say. “Well, maybe a little.”

“A little what?”

“A little smoking, a little drinking,” I say weakly.

I’m ready for him to scold me, but instead he just takes a lab form from the desk and starts frantically scribbling and ticking boxes. He passes me the sheet to take down to the lab in the basement. “They’re routine checks,” he says. “Hemoglobin, syphilis, rubella, hepatitis, HIV, blood type.” The medical words swirl in my head. I think of fluids and tubes and pus and open sores. I start to feel dizzy, reach out a hand to brace myself on the table.

“You okay?” He quickly pulls a chair out from against the wall, “Here, sit. Put your head between your knees.” I lean forward on the chair, my head buried in my hands, focusing on the white-tiled floor. He continues talking, telling me about fetal alcohol syndrome and the effects of smoking on baby size. “If you are using drugs and not telling me, I need to let you know there are risks with congenital abnormalities and premature delivery.” I don’t even understand the words. His voice is muffled and distant. I start to sweat, my mouth gets dry, my muscles slip from bone, and I can barely keep myself on the chair. I tell him I’m going to be sick and he whisks a garbage pail in front of me. Instead I faint.

When I wake I’m on the chair, the doctor’s hands are holding me upright. “You with us now? You just fainted, but you’re all right,” he says, helping me up to the examining table. After a few minutes I am left alone to rest, lying on the crinkly paper. I close my eyes and concentrate on breathing. My face tingles as I feel the blood rush back to my skin. The back of my shirt is wet from sweat and I curl up for heat.