They found her at the start of the first spring rains. The culverts were clogged with leaves and surgical masks and used needles that surely must have swirled around her for days, and when the officers clambered down the banks to find her they came away with rotting leaves thick and slimy on their clothes. She had carried with her a collection of weights and barbells, the modern version of a Mary Wollstonecraft, and she had placed them in a backpack that she then strapped onto her chest. Suicide without the bomber, one of the detectives thought to herself, the only woman in the group, and then felt a flash of shame.
As they pulled her from the water, careful as they were, her pants snagged and pulled down on a branch, and they could see the beginning swell of her belly, a slight curve that answered many questions and spawned a thicket of others. After days in the water, any trauma that might have been written on the body would be harder to find, and the detectives huddled over her swollen frame had no way to satisfy their desire to know if she’d been assaulted, the question that rolls itself off the tongue of nearly every homicide detective when a girl’s body is found in a place it doesn’t belong.
A Missing Persons file sprawled over the lead detective’s desk began to plug in the gaps, even as the coroners were scraping underneath every fingernail and running over her scalp a comb of the kind usually reserved for nits. She’d been a straight-A student, a full scholarship to Stanford firmly in hand, with plans to study English and head abroad to Oxford or Cambridge her junior year. The note, of sorts, she’d left, was her copy of Hamlet, splayed out on her desk against a dark red Stanford sweatshirt and open to Act Three, Scene One, underlined three times in a bright neon green: My honored lord, you know right well you did.
Who the honored lord might be was easy to determine after a few minutes with her surrendered phone, but her missing hours were bracketed neatly inside his alibi: he’d been two hours away visiting his fiancée and her family, his cell phone locating data firmly in place, and his crumpled face when he learned of the fetus, thirteen or fourteen weeks at the most, told them what they needed to know. The reaction of her parents to the same news was as if a rapacious god had pulled open the front of their house, and they were blinking at the light and the dust.
Two floors down from Homicide and Missing Persons were the county courthouses themselves, and behind one judge’s chambers a set of files that might have told more of her story, if the detectives had felt the need to keep combing, if her loaded backpack hadn’t told the tale so simply and well, if there’d been any sign of a struggle or if the boyfriend’s (ex-boyfriend’s) alibi hadn’t held. Notes from a judicial bypass hearing, eight days prior to the day she told her parents she was going to work and instead left the book’s spine broken on her desk.
The notes captured nothing of the girl herself, confidence stripped away from her in the chilly room, as if it had never grown out of her at all but had merely been a coat that snagged on a hook as she passed through the doors; of her voice that insisted on wavering as she tried to explain that no, telling her parents that she was getting an abortion would be the end of everything, and in that moment all the polished words and phrases she’d used to line her life just fell away from her, blown out like a candle. Ofelia had no way to tell the judge just how and why every door in her life would slam shut, how her parents would turn her into Rapunzel, into Rafaela from The House on Mango Street, a book she’d dismissed as overwrought and overprescribed to girls like her. But every metaphor abandoned her, shrinking in the corner, silent.
The judge’s eyes slid over the girl, neat as a pin, a single silver cross around her throat, one brown eye and one hazel, a strawberry-colored birthmark at the edge of her chin. “Did your parents give you that cross?”
“Yes, Your Honor, for my sixteenth birthday.” They’d enclosed it in a white Bible, their eyes full of tears at this milestone of their eldest daughter, as if imagining the day when she’d zip shut the last of her suitcases and walk out of their lives.
“That doesn’t sound like a set of parents who don’t care about their child.”
Ofelia knew this kind of silence, the kind that expected to be filled.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“How about you talk to them? If they still say no, you come back in a week or so and we’ll talk again.” And the judge made a set of marks on the file in front of her, the movements so slight and few that Ofelia imagined there must be a code, an acronym, that existed or had evolved for girls like her, enough to capture her story for the staff who would close her file and set it neatly back on its shelf.
Ofelia’s boyfriend had no idea of the hearing with the judge, or of the reason for it, and even if he had that wouldn’t have helped him understand what he began seeing the day after the detectives came. It started off with little things he could dismiss or reason away: the muddy footprints on their crumbling balcony made no sense, of course, but when he looked more closely he could imagine they weren’t in the shape of feet at all, simply a wavering outline that only the paranoid could imagine as such, and he called his fiancée to scrub them off.
But that night he dreamed that Ofelia was straddling him, her thick soccer thighs that he’d loved, riding him in a way she’d discovered thrilled her, and her belly was flat and smooth, her voice strong and clear, but she was shouting again and again: you know right well you did. When he woke up the bed was soaked, pooling over his chest and running down onto the floor, clogged with leaves thick and slimy, and he knew without thinking just where the wetness was coming from, but what could he do, exactly? Who would he tell?
He lumbered to where his fiancée lay sleeping in their baby’s room, her long fingers draped between the bars of the crib. He’d kill anyone who touched either of them, he’d always said. Of course, what to do if that someone was already dead?
The judge might have expected something if she’d imagined it were possible. She’d been harassed plenty of times, had bullets sent to her in the mail, had text messages from anonymous numbers calling her a “viscous cunt”. But she was unprepared for waking up one morning to a bedroom streaked with slimy leaves and mud flecked with hypodermic needles, muddy handprints on her daughter’s bronzed baby shoes. She had seen a headline about a drowned girl found in a creek with weights strapped to her chest, but never connected it to anything. She’d never thought of Ofelia except to wonder once in passing about that meek young girl with the birthmark, if she had ever spoken to her parents and if they had risen to the occasion and put away their judgments to welcome a new life into the world.
The judge could never remember when it started after that. Whether what came first was the nausea thick on her tongue, as if there were a layer between herself and everything she might eat, like a strip of cheesecloth filtering out everything but bile, and the only things she could keep down were a strawberry smoothie and a ridiculously salty Coppa, sliced thin like flayed flesh; or if it was struggling to pull herself out of bed and feeling as though she was swimming up through layers of water. Thick with leaves. The question rattled inside as she knelt over the toilet, trying to count when her period had come last, this visitor she could have just as well done without now that she was nearly forty-three, this unwanted knocking every single month but to nothing, like kids ringing the bell only to flee down the hall.
There was no explanation for the printout that sat in her lap a week after Easter, lining up below reports of thyroid function and blood sugar, everything normal but this: PPCT, positive, estimated gestational age 7-8 weeks per hCG levels. It never occurred to her that it was anything other than a mistake. It had been more than a year since she’d been with a man, and in the ten minutes while the doctors huddled down the hall she scrolled through her phone, searching for articles on “false positive pregnancy tests,” telling herself she knew better than to stumble into internet black holes.
Even as the cold gel slid over the ultrasound wand, the judge insisted to the technologist that there was no way this could be true: that like she’d told the advice nurse, her doctor, even the receptionist who made the appointment, it just wasn’t possible, and then the ultrasound crawled across the screen in front of them both, watery and black and white and unmistakable, telling the same story as the tests run on urine and blood. The face of the tech shifted to an expression she must be used to wearing, one the judge herself had worn in her own way: for the teenagers who insisted as they held their mother’s hands that the tests must be wrong, to please run them again, because there was no way that result could be right. It slid so easily into that mode, a practiced thing, a worn groove. Are we still going with the “impossible” story? this face seemed to say. Seems to be a lot of immaculate conceptions around here these days.
She flashed again to the night of the leaves, but the alarm systems from that night had shown nothing, every window lock and door undisturbed, and the ultrasound in front of her was making a lie of the camera feed. She was going to be one of those women, the second she opened her mouth. The messy ones, the ones who stuck to their stories even when the tests, the eyewitnesses, the photos in front of them were perfectly clear, and yet she could remember so many stupid women—not only women, mind—who insisted until the end, until the bailiff led them away, that the photos, the tests, the witnesses, were wrong. She’d never understood why they’d bother to tell such an obvious lie. Such a waste of time. There were no words she could imagine that wouldn’t put herself in their company, that would erase the look from the technologist’s face. She could feel herself shrinking inside her gown, and she meekly accepted the printouts they gave her and the appointments they made, the directions to the pharmacy to pick up prenatal vitamins and Diclectin for the queasiness.
With every day that her waistline expanded, she could feel herself shrinking in kind. Every morning she would lie very still, as if her old reality was waiting for her, like a jacket she’d left draped over a chair, and she could imagine it for a breath or two, perhaps three at the most, until the rush to vomit crumpled her onto the floor. The pink kidney-shaped basin, no matter how often she scrubbed it, always smelled rancid and sour, reminding her that this was still real, this story she seemed to have walked into without knowing the beginning or the end. Sleep was harder to reach every night, the slightest disturbance pulling her awake, and when she did dream she was always drowning. The worst dream was of herself, in the lake behind her childhood home, feet tangled in brown leaves rotting to slime, grasping at what felt like an outcropping of rock, only to feel it begin pushing her down, her arms and legs fighting the weight.
She remembered reading how a malnourished body when pregnant would cannibalize itself, and as she grew thinner she wondered if the baby was forcing her to do just that. One week she could tolerate nothing but kidney beans with pickled onions; the next, only a jar of sour cherries she stole from a neighbor’s grocery delivery, a thing she’d never done in her life. She stood in the building’s hallway swallowing half the jar of the incredibly sour fruit before she could stop herself. She imagined herself as anyone else would see her: skin the color of old milk and studded with bruises, eyes ringed with bumpy flesh in maroon giving over to purple, bright cherry flecks clinging to her hair. As she stumbled through her door still clutching the jar, she saw the words scrawled in her favorite lipstick on the surface of the fridge: It killed Charlotte Brontë, you know.
“Hyperemesis gravidarum,” the doctor pronounced at her next visit. She had no intention of telling him she already knew the term, or just how she’d been led to it the night before. She could imagine a new rickety Latin phrase making its way into her chart: pre-partum psychosis. A door into a world of soft and bland things she could never use to hurt herself, the anxious fluttering around her belly, the rising mound they were protecting against her. Ha. And just who would protect her from it? She blanched at the word in her own brain, the it. Behind the doctor she could see the line graph of her weight, a dizzying descent into zones colored orange and then red.
“In most cases, it’s already resolved itself long before this stage. If it hasn’t, we don’t have a lot of hope that it will improve. The impact I’m seeing in these tests is worse than I can ever recall. And we can expect it to get worse.” She tried to imagine what she looked like through the notes on the screen: the ravages to organs and bones as the thing inside consumed her from within. His fingers grazed the screen and she recoiled, as though they had somehow touched her.
“What are you saying to me?”
“I’m saying you’re only eighteen weeks. Termination is still an option.” She could feel a fluttering inside her belly, just inside her rib cage, and she imagined a trapped creature beating its wing against the bars.
“I’ve never done anything like that.” She hated her voice for its wavering. “I’ve never walked away from a challenge. Especially when it’s not the baby’s fault.” It was what she held to when desperate young women flocked to her courtroom, this rush to protect them from a decision she knew they would surely regret. A thread of blood dripped onto the floor, her third nosebleed that morning.
“I understand.” He held himself very still, the kind of silence that could sit as long as it needed to, until there was something to say. The fluttering grew stronger as she let her eyes close to imagine it, the lie she could create with the same skill she’d used to weave the story of the younger man who impregnated her and then disappeared. She could almost smell the chicken soup her neighbors would bring, see the cards slipping through the mail slot, consoling her on the terrible miscarriage that had come after all this time. Sleep returning, her organs slowly knitting their way back. When she spoke, her voice was faint and thin, and she had to swallow twice and try again.
“Maybe—”
That was when the flutter became a thud, and she was throwing out her hands before she even understood that she was hurtling towards the floor.
The judge called her daughter at college that night, dialing awkwardly around the cast on her right hand, plaster cradling the weakened bone that had cracked right down the middle.
“It wasn’t like I was falling, so much as … like something was pushing me.” From inside, she didn’t let herself say, and she wondered just who her silence was protecting. Or what. The judge could hear her daughter suck in a deep breath.
“Mom, I’m so worried about you. Every time I talk to you it’s like you’ve lost something else. Are you sure this is what you want?”
All those girls in her courtroom, so sure of what they wanted. She had asked just the same question of them. She felt the roiling in her stomach again, though she had eaten nothing all day.
“I’ll call you back.”
As she stood up from the toilet and wiped her mouth, she could feel the tug of the phone in her pocket, a line that could take her back to where no sex meant no babies; where she could walk more than a block without her body threatening to collapse, a sac of blood and bone wrapped around the growth inside her. She began to pace even though every step sent pain stabbing up her spine. She opened a browser on her phone and stared for minute after minute at the number before she hit “send.”
“Thank you for calling Planned Parenthood. If this is an emergency—”
She never got to hear the rest.
The judge’s daughter arrived on a red-eye from Chicago, just in time to see her mother being wheeled into surgery for the broken hip she’d sustained in a sudden fall in her bathroom. “Don’t worry; the baby’s going to be fine,” they reassured the young woman as the gurney parted the surgery doors.
“And my mother? Is she going to be fine?” she shouted back before the doors swung shut.
The judge was placed on full bed rest, and her daughter canceled an internship in D.C. and put her fall semester on hold so she could care for her mother, hiring someone to dismantle the couch and coffee table in favor of a hospital bed. She winced the first time the patient was installed inside the monstrous thing and the home health aide pulled up and secured the locking sides. “Isn’t that a little … extreme?” she asked the aide. “And if she falls again?” came the response, a little more clipped than it needed to be.
The judge seemed to her daughter to have emerged from surgery an even smaller version of herself, the locked bed rails a sort of reverse cocoon. The judge let reality TV babble all day long, when before she’d sneered at the producers’ cheap manipulation of their stars, the predictability of every show. She submitted without protest to the locking bed rails and the daily blood draws, and she spent her hours somewhere neither dreaming nor waking, the space between them thin as a membrane.
The week after she arrived, the young woman sat down beside her mother’s hospital bed, afternoon light weakening through the pink curtains, her hands clutching stacks of test results, spotted everywhere in red ink, and she took in a breath to ask again the question that had been beating inside her for days. But the judge must have read the question on her face, because before the young woman could say a word her mother’s hands shot out into the air and her thin voice began babbling, like an incantation: “No, no, no, no, no, don’t say it. Please. I won’t do it. I promise. I promise.”
The condo sank into summer and fall to the rhythms of the blood pressure monitor, the alarms for turning the patient’s body against bedsores. By September, after two trips to the emergency room, it included twice-weekly visits of a dialysis machine. And always, any time of day or night, the retching into the basin, its shape a cruel reminder of the organs that had apparently given up the fight.
In the dark days after what should have been Thanksgiving, her mother’s due date still five days away, the judge’s daughter woke at 3 a.m. to find the bed rails down and the bathroom door locked against her, retching and sobbing sounds carrying through the wood.
“I said that, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I remember you now. Oh no, oh no, I remember.”
“Remember what, Mom? Please let me in!”
“I did this. I did this. You’ve been killing me for months, haven’t you? Please don’t kill me. Don’t kill me anymore.” The voice was low, thick, struggling.
“Mom? Who’s there?” The door rattled in its frame and swung open, and the young woman clapped a hand over her mouth and ran scrambling for her phone.
At the hospital, as she gripped her mother’s hands during every contraction, she told herself that there was no way she could have seen everything in that bathroom that her eyes insisted was there. The maroon puddle on the floor with a ring of baby teeth, in a room with no baby in it. That bloody mouth in her mother’s face, opening wide and spitting onto the tiles a long yellow sash, or at least it must have been yellow once, National Honor Society in white lettering stained with red. The bathroom mirror, swinging open above their heads, scratched with tiny lettering neater than her mother’s had ever been: Come back in a week or so and we’ll talk again.
The baby came after twenty hours of labor, three pints of blood, and an emergency C-section that ended just before dawn. The judge’s daughter, stiff and bleary in the visitor’s chair, watched the nurse place the newborn girl on her mother’s chest while another reached out with a washcloth to wipe the judge’s matted hair from her face, sallow with what the doctors were warning could mean liver failure.
A little fist stabbed into the empty air, aiming for its mother’s face. The nurse reached out to cover the tiny nails with a pair of peach-colored mitts, and the fist swung its way at her chin. The nurse’s nervous laughter sounded forced. “What, you don’t want to wear your mitts?” But then she caught the baby’s gaze and the peach wool dropped to the floor.
The judge’s voice sounded like it had been beaten within an inch of its life. It barely rose over the thrumming of the dialysis machine, the monitor ready to shriek when her blood pressure again shot dangerously low.
“Come here, Ofelia. Don’t hurt Mama now.”
“Ofelia? That’s an unusual name.” The nurse’s eyes rested anywhere but on the baby’s face, one brown eye and one hazel, the birthmark at the edge of the little chin.
“Oh, yes. That’s her name.” The judge’s voice kept on fading. “And she’s going to be a world-beater, aren’t you? That’s right. You’re just going to set the world on fire.”
Content Warnings: blood, reproductive coercion, loss of bodily autonomy
