IGMS Issue 50 (19 page)

It happened on the third time around. Everything had gone right, and she and Mark had made sloppy, laughing love on the kitchen floor. This is it, she'd thought. Just keep going now.

She'd known what to expect from the ultrasound. She'd been there before. She'd see his perfect little hands and feet. "There's his little penis," the doctor would say.

Mark couldn't understand why she started crying when they saw the ultrasound. The doctor paused with one hand pointing to the screen and looked at Carol with a perplexed look on her face. "But she's perfectly healthy and normal," the doctor said to Carol. "There's nothing to worry about."

It's not the right one, Carol wanted to scream and didn't even wait until they left the office before going back. Right there on the exam table, half-naked and her belly smeared with goop. A breath later she watched the hummingbird come in to feed.

She lifted the cup of too-sweet tea to her lips with a hand that shook and listened for the sound of the water stopping in the bathroom.

Was it abortion if she never gave it a chance? A daughter instead of a son. Was it abortion if she simply never allowed it to happen?

But it's not the same. Not right. Go back and keep trying.

"Here, let me get that," Mark said, taking the cup from her hand for the fourth time. But she was still trembling, and even his arms around her couldn't warm her. For her, it had only been minutes ago that she'd been lying on a sterile examination table with Mark's hand in hers. And now Mark was here again, but he didn't know, couldn't remember what had never happened for him.

Should I have just kept going? she couldn't help but wonder as she clutched at Mark's arms. Would that be giving up? I could start all over, just keep going.

How much harder is it to live with the mistake?

This isn't working. Go back and start over.

A perfect little boy with perfect hands and perfect feet. A gate at the top of the stairs to prevent accidents.

Too late now to try to live with the consequences of that mistake. Another span of time that existed only in her memory.

How many countless random factors are involved in the fertilization of an egg by a particular sperm?

"There's his little penis," the doctor said.

"I'm not immortal. I merely have a potentially endless life."

Mark's hand slowly stroked the swell of her belly as they lay curled on the couch together.

"A boy," he said, his voice barely audible.

A boy, her thoughts echoed. It's going to work this time.

The fifth time the bleeding had started in the fourth month. If she'd believed in a god, she would have thought that it was punishment for not letting the girl have a chance. Going back after that one was easy. Mark's face so full of loss when he had to come into the hospital room and tell her that she'd lost it. She had to go back simply to get away from that horrible pain in his eyes. It was the one time she felt relief to be able to erase time.

She watched the hummingbird come to the feeder and wondered what Mark would have done if he'd known about the accident. Whose fault was it? Either way that pain had never happened for anyone but her. That pain was gone for him.

Too gone.

The wrong morning, she thought. Too far. Before he was a baby. Before she'd been pregnant. Before he'd even been conceived.

She set the cup down, half off the table.

The hummingbird flickered around the faded red plastic feeder in a blaze of emerald wings and ruby throat as she sipped her tea and pondered the bright futures stretching before her and her wonderful family. Sped away as she heard the high-pitched scream and then the crash. A streak of blue and green away from the window. The cup slipped from her hand and smashed to the floor as she ran to the foot of the stairs. Blue and green and red.

The instant she'd gone back, she'd set the cup down and ran upstairs to get the gate closed. Except there was no gate. And when she looked in the nursery there was a desk and boxes and the horror of the memory of what the room had looked like before she got pregnant.

Three years.

"Carol?"

She stood in the living room and looked up at the staircase. Mark came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist, gently stroked his hands over the swell of her belly.

"Carol?" he repeated. "Is everything all right?"

We should move, she thought. We should get into a different house, a safer house.

But now she was thinking of changing things, when she'd been trying so hard all along to keep everything the same. Which was right?

"It's not the same," she murmured.

"What's not the same?" Mark asked her, but then the baby kicked under his hands, and his gasp of pure delight forestalled the words in her throat.

This. Me. You. I can't make it the same. I can't get it back.

There'd been hardly any blood, but it didn't matter. She knew it was bad. She knew that joints weren't supposed to bend that way, or heads to turn that far.

Mark must have heard the noise, for she heard his running footsteps. And she couldn't remember, didn't know whose fault it was. But did it matter? She could fix it, she knew. She could make it right. He didn't have to be twisted and broken. But she didn't want Mark to see, even in an existence that was soon not going to have happened. So she went back.

To a morning when she sat and gazed at the hummingbird at the feeder. A morning that was safe, still fresh in her memory.

She covered Mark's hand with hers and looked at the staircase. She felt the baby move again, felt Mark's breath, warm and comforting on her neck as he stood behind her, holding her close and safe.

He'd never kicked this much before--the first time, the real time.

What was real now?

"He's not the same," she breathed.

"Carol?"

She turned to face Mark and looked long at his eyes, his chin, his nose. That first child had had all of them. So like Mark.

That first child long gone in an existence that had never happened.

"It's never going to be the same," she said. "It's impossible. I'm never going to get him back."

Mark frowned, worry darkening his eyes. "Carol, you're not making sense. Who are you talking about?"

I'm immortal, she thought, but I'm not living.

So much harder to keep going forward. So much uncertainty, so many mistakes that might be made. The only way to go forward is to live it out.

"Carol? What's wrong?"

If she told him, he would think she was raving. But she knew she was finally approaching something akin to sanity.

I'm trying to fix something that can't be fixed, she thought.

Was it better to live than to be immortal? How many years had she spent trying to recreate something that couldn't be made again?

She looked up at Mark. It could have been worse, she realized. What if she'd gone back so far that she'd lost him too?

"You're just tired," Mark said. He took her hand and guided her to the couch.

"More tired than you can know." Too many years. She sat against him as he wrapped his arms around her and stroked her belly, and she grieved the son he would never know again.

The End

Diana Rowland takes the rubric "write what you know" to urban fantasy extremes. Her bio acknowledges that she's worked as a morgue assistant, a detective, and a crime scene investigator, and this experience is readily apparent in her White Trash Zombie series (
My Life As a White Trash Zombie
,
Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues
,
White Trash Zombie Apocalypse
,
How the White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back
, and last autumn's
White Trash Zombie Gone Wild)
and Kara Gillian "Demon" books (
Mark of the Demon
,
Blood of the Demon
,
Secrets of the Demon
,
Sins of the Demon
,
Touch of the Demon
,
Fury of the Demon
, and
Vengeance of the Demon
). She's an alumna of Clarion West and took home a first place slot for the third quarter of 2005's
Writers of the Future
competition with her first entry. She's also a member of a very exclusive club: female authors of Urban Fantasy who have successfully moved a series from one publisher to another!

Schoen:
You've had occasion to know--better than most authors--just how fickle the publishing world can be. You've lived through every author's nightmare of having your publisher drop your series in the middle, and you've come out the other side. These things are, presumably, not personal, but rather reflect business decisions as editors come and go, imprints live and die, and the folks in accounting and marketing contribute their own two cents. What was your experience when you received word that Bantam was done with Kara Gilliam? And, just to bring things back to a happier level, how did the news that DAW wanted her affect you?

Rowland:
It wasn't so much that Bantam was done with Kara Gillian, but that Bantam was done, period. This was part of the fallout from Black Wednesday, when the publishing houses did a slash-and-burn of personnel, imprints, titles, and anything else that wasn't an immediate and visible asset. Bantam got the ax, and any Bantam author who wasn't already a Big Name or top seller simply didn't get another contract.

Now, there weren't any big announcements that no new contracts would be forthcoming. My agent and I found out when we started wondering why we'd received no response to his nice, "Hey, that first book sure did sell well for a debut. How about you buy another few in the series?" query--especially since a no-reply was very out of character for my editor. After a polite nudge, my (very upset) editor called my agent with the news about the imprint and told him that she been fighting for the series, but in the end there was nothing she could do.

So there I was, two books into a brand spanking new series, and no publisher. (This was before ebooks were anything more than an interesting but very tiny corner of the market, and self-publishing wasn't an even remotely viable option.) I also knew that the chances that another publisher would pick up a mid-list series mid-stream were slim to none. My agent had a few lines he still wanted to tug, but I didn't dare pin my hopes on them. After a few bouts of wine and chocolate, I allowed myself to face the reality that the Kara Gillian series was dead.

Which meant I needed to get my ass to work and come up with something else to write.

I brainstormed and dug through old notes and looked at the market then churned out chapters and a synopsis for a YA steampunkish alternate world something-or-other. I emailed it to my agent who soon emailed me back with the comment, "This doesn't knock my socks off" which translates roughly to, "This really sucks ass, WTF."

So, I scrapped that proposal, then came across notes I'd made back when I was working at the coroner's office about a zombie who worked in a morgue. Back when I first had the idea, I was deep in the throes of writing the first two Kara Gillian books for Bantam, and had therefore tabled the concept for the time being.

I read through my notes, and made more notes, and got more and more excited about it. Three chapters came as easily as breathing, and I put together a fairly coherent synopsis for a book about a white trash zombie then sent it to my agent.

His reply: "THIS knocks my socks off."

Now, in the meantime, he'd sent my first book to Betsy Wollheim at DAW since she'd been interested in the manuscript when it was first being shopped. He went ahead and sent the white trash zombie proposal to Betsy as well. Not long after that, she got in touch with him and asked him if he could please not show the proposal to anyone else just yet?

Okay, I thought. Kara Gillian is dead, but maybe I can sell a book or two in this new series. That would be pretty cool, right?

About a week later, I received an email from my agent that said (paraphrasing), "I told you so," and went on to tell me that DAW was going to buy the next three Demon books . . . AND three white trash zombie books.

From dead career to six-book deal.

There was more wine and chocolate involved after that, but in the very best of ways.

Schoen:
In your Kara Gillian books you slip in various details about the honor of Demons, which is a surprising and different take. What's behind this? Are you simply using this as a device to explore the concept in human society, or to further separate the way you distinguish your "monster" books from the more traditional vampire and werewolf fodder?

Rowland:
Well, for starters, the demons in my books aren't "demons from hell." The traditional demons from hell are evil because they are evil. They are demons. They're from hell. Hell is evil. Therefore they are evil.