Marcia, the former juvenile public defender, brought a box of coffee to share with everyone at group therapy today. It smells amazing. I never liked coffee before, and I want to get some too, but everyone can see that I’m pregnant now. I’m not sure if they’ll judge me.
It’s not that pregnant women can’t have caffeine; it’s that you’re not supposed to have over a certain amount. The doctor said I could have a large cup of coffee every day and it would be okay. Until now, I didn’t really care to have any.
Everyone acts like the rule is no caffeine when you’re pregnant, and I’m already feeling self-conscious enough in this room full of people mostly in their thirties.
But the coffee smells so good.
“Are we ready to begin?” Dr. Singh asks us. Everyone is murmuring assent when I jump up.
“I’m just gonna…” I mumble over my shoulder as I rush to the table. My mouth actually waters as I pour the cup and stir in a bit of milk. I hurry back to the circle, careful not to spill a precious drop.
One of the older women leans over as I sit down. “Do you think you sh—”
“Oh my God, Wanda! Mind your own fucking business,” Brittaney groans. She rolls her eyes in my direction, and I give her a weak smile of thanks.
Dr. Singh doesn’t remind Brittaney about her language, which I think means he agrees that Wanda should mind her own business. He starts the session talking about how trauma causes physical changes to the brain. I can’t help but think about how Finny would find it interesting, all this talk about inflexible neuropathways.
“Your novel came from your brain, Autumn, word by word, and I wish I could understand how your brain is able to do that.” His hands on the steering wheel, his face illuminated in the dashboard light. Just being near him made me feel more alive.
Brittaney chimes in, “Sometimes it’s like I hear my ex-boyfriend’s voice, saying, ‘You killed my baby. You killed our fucking daughter,’ over and over, exactly the way he said it. And it feels like I physically can’t stop myself from thinking about that moment. My brain gets caught in a loop.”
Part of me thinks I had to have misheard her. I’ve covered my mouth with my hand, and as I lower it, I look around the room, but no one seems to think that Brittaney has said anything particularly shocking. A few people are nodding. Someone else talks about being unable to stop analyzing the moment before their assault.
I drink my coffee and listen and wonder why I am here.
But then I remember; I can hear my boyfriend’s voice in my head too.
This time, I’m not surprised when Brittaney is waiting for me when I come out of the bathroom stall.
“You’re having a girl,” she announces without preamble. “I thought you should know.” She’s leaning against the counter so she’s practically sitting on it, her toes barely grazing the ground.
“Cool,” I say as I head to the sink.
“I know you don’t believe me,” she says, “but I’m always right. When’s the ultrasound where you find out?”
“Next week.” I begin to wash my hands. This seems to be our routine. “Are you excited?”
I look up. Our eyes meet in the mirror. “No,” I admit to her.
“Why not? You have someone to go with you? Where’s the daddy?” “He’s dead,” I say, because I figure if we’re going to talk, I might as
well match her speed. I turn from the mirror and grab a paper towel to dry my hands. “My mom will go with me. But I’m scared that there’ll be something wrong with the baby.”
“Oh, girl, it’ll be fine!” She shrugs. “And if it’s not, it’s outta your hands. Sometimes shit is.” She sighs.
I hesitate before asking, “You had a baby die?”
“Brain cancer,” Brittaney says. “It was fast. They found it on her one- year checkup, and she was gone before she was two.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It is what it is,” she says, and for the first time, I can see that her nonchalance is her armor. I feel guilty for not seeing it before.
“If it was cancer,” I say, “why would your ex-boyfriend say it was your fault that she died?”
For the first time ever, Brittaney looks uncomfortable with our conversation.
“Like I said before, I don’t start showing until the third trimester, and I’d only gotten my period a couple of times before I got pregnant, so it was easy for me to be in denial for a while. By the time I knew for sure I was pregnant, I was six months gone, and I was thirteen. I’d been smoking cigarettes since I was eleven, so it was hard for me to give up.” She looks at my face. “I tried. I really did. But finally my doctor told me that at a certain
point, my being so stressed out was more harmful to the baby than a cigarette. I was really stressed too, you know? The foster mom I had that year was a bitch. Her nephew was my baby daddy, and since he was nineteen, she was worried she was gonna get in trouble with my social worker. It was a whole thing.”
“He was nineteen? And you were only thirteen?”
“He was the one buying our cigarettes anyway!” She holds her hands up in exasperation. “I asked the cancer doctor, and she said those cigarettes would have only increased the chances by one percent, that it was mostly genetics that gave my baby that kinda cancer, not me having one cigarette a day.” Brittaney gives her trademark shrug. “I was able to quit smoking last time I was pregnant. I was your age, and things were a little better for me. I’d just bought my house and stuff.”
“You own a house?” She should probably be insulted by my surprise, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“Okay, so you won’t believe this, but before my parents lost their shit to drugs, they were doctors.” She chuckles and leans forward to whisper, like she’s telling me a dirty joke. “Can you imagine going to medical school, getting married, having a kid in preschool, and then getting hooked on fucking dope? Couple of losers, those two.” She laughs and rolls her eyes so hard this time that it looks like it hurts. “But the one thing they couldn’t sell for drugs—and trust me, they sold everything for drugs, even me—was their life insurance policies. I got to collect on those when I turned eighteen, and I bought my house, free and clear. Neighborhood’s a bit rough, but the school’s okay, and I can save money on gas most days walking to my job.”
“Girls?” Wanda sticks her head inside the restroom. “We’re waiting on you. Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, tell Singh we’re coming,” Brittaney says. “She’s a total suck-up,” she whispers to me.
I nod.
She is a survivor, Dr. Singh had said.
I don’t share anything during group therapy, even though Dr. Singh gives me several significant looks. I don’t know what he expects from me. The others are talking about being unable to save children or getting shot at or raped.
Perhaps when Dr. Singh said I could learn something from Brittaney, he meant I could learn that I didn’t really have anything to be traumatized about.
But then, even though our circumstances are so different, the things the others say about their traumas sound like the things I feel about Finny’s death, like we carry an indelible mark on us.
I don’t speak, but I listen.
When the session is over, I have a text message from Mom. Her car has a flat, and Angelina is coming to change it for her, but they’ll be late picking me up. I stop short in the lobby. I should have brought my book about French parenting to read in case of something like this.
“You okay?” Brittaney asks. She’s already holding her cigarettes and lighter in one hand, and we aren’t even outside.
“Yeah, my ride is late,” I say. “Oh shit, where you live?” “Ferguson.”
“My favorite foster mom lived in Ferguson! I live in North County too. I can drop you off.”
“No, no—”
“Girl, people bring their unvaccinated, snot-nosed kids through this lobby all day long. You’ll catch a new kind of measles that gives your baby superpowers or something. Don’t worry. I don’t smoke in my car. I’ll have this done by the time I reach the parking garage. Wait right here.”
Before I can protest again, she heads outside and lights up to smoke as she walks, ignoring the landscaped pathways and crossing flower beds, stepping over the bushes surrounding the building as she makes her way to the garage.
A car pulls up a few minutes later with a muffler that rattles, and I know it’s hers. She waves me in, and I open the door and sit down next to her.
“I’ll keep the window open a minute until the cigarette smell gets out of my clothes.”
“No, you don’t have to,” I say as it occurs to me that maybe she needs to go overboard to protect my child for her sake, because of what she went through. “But thank you.”
Brittaney makes the wide turn on the roundabout to leave the hospital’s campus. “So I called my old foster mama in Ferguson, and I’m gonna go see her after I drop you off!”
“Oh, that’s nice,” I say. “When did you live with her?” “That was while Dione was sick.”
I feel an ache at the way she says the name.
“She took care of me afterward. She was the one who got me to fill out all the paperwork to get the money from my parents’ insurance, ’cause at first I was like, I want nothing to do with anything that has their name on it, you know?”
“Yeah, I kinda do,” I say.
“Oh?” she glances as me as she rolls up the window manually.
“I recently found out that my, uh, baby’s daddy’s father put a bunch of money in his name before he died, so like, legally, the money should be the baby’s. To get it, I’d either have to deal with him or sue him, and part of me doesn’t want to do anything about it.”
“But it’s not your money,” Brittany says, still smacking her gum. “It’s your kid’s money, right? So you gotta think about that.”
“I know,” I say.
“You have to think about the future, even when it feels like there won’t be a future. That’s what Sherry, my foster mama, said to me. You got dreams and shit, Autumn?”
I can’t help my smile.
“Yeah, I got dreams and shit. I want to be a writer,” I say. “I mean, I am a writer. I wrote a novel, and I’ve started editing it, and when I finish, I’m going to look for an agent, then a publisher.”
“No shit? Look at you, girl. Fucking proud of you. But writing doesn’t pay out, does it?”
“No, probably not.”
“Man, I was so glad I had that money when I found out I was pregnant with CiCi—my daughter’s name is Cierra, but nobody calls her that but me when I’m mad—but babies are expensive. Have you read The Hip Mama Survival Guide?”
“Uh, no?”
“Okay, so that’s, like, required reading for you, okay? What’s her fucking name… mermaid politician? Ariel Gore, that’s it! Read it. You need it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.” I wasn’t expecting a book recommendation from her, and it’s a pleasant surprise.
“I’ll be getting off the highway soon. What street are you on?”
I give her directions to my house (“No way! I used to get drunk at the creek by your house!”), and we settle into a surprisingly comfortable silence.
I look out the window at the splendor of the season I was named for. “You should try not to stress about the ultrasound,” Brittaney offers.
“Most of the time, this baby doesn’t even feel real,” I admit to the fall colors outside the window. “But when it does, then it hurts, because I can’t think about this baby without thinking about Finny and how he died and how someday, somehow this baby will di—”
I realize what I’m saying and start to apologize, but Brittaney is nodding.
“Being scared for the kid is a big part of the job.”
“How do you live with it?” I’m asking about so many things.
“I don’t know,” Brittaney says. “I guess the reason I don’t break down scared that something will happen to CiCi is because if I did, who would be her mama? Like, maybe she deserves better than me, but I’m the only mother she’s got. I guess if me and my girlfriend get married someday, she’d have two mamas, but you know what I mean. Right now, CiCi needs me to make sure that she’s clean and fed and knows she’s loved, so I can’t lose my shit.”
“Clean, fed, loved,” I repeat. A puzzle piece feels like it’s falling into place for me.
“Yeah, those three things are, like, ninety percent of the job. They’re also the only things you’ll be able to control. The world’s gonna fuck with your kid no matter what. All you can do is teach ’em to brush their teeth and love themselves.”
“That’s the first thing about parenting that anyone has said that actually makes me feel like I can do this,” I say.
My home is in sight, and as Brittaney pulls up, I’m reciting “clean, fed, loved” to myself. This is the list that I needed, the measuring stick of minimum standards. As long as Finny’s child is clean, fed, and loved, then I’m doing an okay job.
Sure, as children grow, they’re mostly cleaning and feeding themselves, and the loved part becomes complicated as they start to break away, but by then there will be a foundation to our relationship, and knowing who they are as a person will help guide me.
For now, when I’m envisioning this baby, all I have to tell myself is that I will be dedicated to keeping them clean, fed, and loved.
“So one last thing?” Brittaney says as she stops the car. “About the ultrasound?”
“Yeah?”
“If there is something wrong with your baby, then your baby is lucky to have you for their mama, because you’ll love it anyway and do whatever you can for her. Your kid is lucky to have a mama who cares, so no matter what, they’re already ahead of the game.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll think about that. And thanks for the ride and talking with me. I appreciate that.”
“Oh, no biggie,” she says.
I get out of the car and start to shut the door but turn back when she shouts from the car window.
“And hey, Autumn?” “What?”
“I’m right about it being a girl. You’ll see.”
