November 2024 Web Feature by Anna Carvlin
Anna Carvlin is a public health advocate and aspiring career writer. She has a master’s degree in public health from Tulane, a certificate in creative writing from the Santa Fe Community College, and is working on a Master of Arts in English from Eastern New Mexico University. Carvlin’s writing has appeared in several publications, including South Side Weekly, Defunkt Magazine, Bending Genres, and Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction, an anthology project through the Off Campus Writers Workshop. She lives on the South Side of Chicago with her family.
This piece was originally featured in our Spring 2024 issue and was chosen as a web feature for November 2024.
Ester rolled onto her side away from Chaz to face the window. Bright sunlight pierced through the perimeter of the drawn blinds. “If. . .” she replied and shrugged. The remainder of her incoherent sentence trailed off inaudibly.
Chaz nuzzled into the back of her neck. ” ‘if’ what?” he asked. “Do you want to? Have a baby with me?”
When Chaz had promised to come over that day, Ester pretend to believe him and labored through the motions to rehabilitate her appearance. She washed her hair with heavy arms, shaved her legs, applied leave-in apple-scented conditioner, and plucked the bare minimum around her bikini line. She dutifully uprooted a band of gray hairs poking out on top of her head and blew each strand one by one into the toilet. Ester was unsure whether the fatigue consuming her body that morning was emotional or hormonal.
Chaz had no idea that today marked the anniversary of Ester’s third miscarriage, the day the baby’s heart stopped. Or at least the day she could no longer hear it on her fetal Doppler.
During a rushed visit to the clinic, which her husband had tried to talk her out of (“The baby’s there. She’s fine.”), the screen revealed only gray where reds and blues had pulsated in 3D during the prior week’s visit. The nurse midwife scheduled a dilation and evacuation for later the same day. Ester, replete with adrenaline-fueled denial and distress, hurried to a nearby café and called her husband.
“She’s gone.”
His reply, forgettable, provided nothing for comfort. And he could not, or would not, make it back in time to be with her during the procedure.
Ester’s obstetrician, Dr. Jenner, vacuumed her out and pulverized the fetus. That word “pulverized” hovered in Ester’s mind during the year like an accusation. She had lacked the courage to ingest misoprostol since the process could be longer and more painful than a dilation and evacuation. Still, she had asked if she could see the baby after the procedure. Dr. Jenner replied in the negative, citing that the fetus would be “pulverized.” Maybe the doctor had said “liquidized” or possibly “unrecognizable.” Regardless, misoprostol might have allowed Ester to cradle the slippery, ghostly white body in the crook of her elbow, to hold the barely formed hand between two fingers, and to say goodbye.
To deliberately introduce an innocent life into her womb, her death trap, sounded like a conspiracy to murder. Serial murder. Ester’s desire to hold her own baby was too thick to acknowledge. The want smothered her days. The energy required to wade through the sticky substance of longing left her exhausted. What is the dividing line between a yearning and a need? Would a new baby satisfy this wish? Or had losing her baby already damaged a sizable portion of her life force irrevocably?
“I’m a baby killer,” Ester had told her longtime friend, Clara, after a second early miscarriage.
“It’ll happen next time,” Clara replied, “you cannot have three miscarriages.”
Ester also wanted to believe in optimistic idioms like “the third time’s the charm,” that luck would intervene and command a third baby to stick around.
A week before the miscarriage, at fourteen weeks, the third baby looked like a baby on the ultrasound monitor screen. It had even jerked as if a noise had startled it. Ester had chosen a name, though she was careful not to share, not even to her then-husband.
Clara, one of the many people Ester rarely contacted now, had been wrong. The baby died much further along in her development than the other two had vanished. A more honest idiom to live by: “It can always get worse.”
After the miscarriage and a speedy divorce, Ester lay on her side of the bed on the eve of returning to work—vacation and sick days used up—holding a quilt in fists at her neck. A tinny wind chime knocked around musicales right outside the window. Ultrasound photos had been strewn on the night table since the loss. Wrapped in darkness in the apartment alone, she repeated out loud her mental refrain: “I’m a baby killer.”
“You’re lucky,” her grandma said once to a sobbing ten-year-old Ester after she had broken a femur. “At least it wasn’t your neck. I’ll take a broken leg any day.”
Was she lucky now, too, but not able to see it? The worst had not yet transpired. Right? Could she endure this adversity with a touch of fierceness? Miscarriage, divorce from a short-lived marriage: everyday misfortunes; people forge ahead. Then why did death from a broken neck or not existing at all sound better than life after a dead baby? Why was she second-guessing whether her baby, the one with a name, was ever really a baby?
“I can’t even breathe,” she said to herself. “How am I supposed to go to work?” Her muscles had weakened during the previous stagnant weeks. She picked up one of the ultrasound printouts with the effort required to retrieve a ten-pound weight and studied the contours of the baby’s skull.
“I wish I hadn’t been so cautious about loving you,” she said to the black and white picture, then dropped it. “I won’t forget you, Anastasia. I promise.”
She woke up the next day and the day after that and went to work, pushing through a viscous mental haze. Her baby never had the opportunity to live, so Ester would at least try on her behalf. What did she have to lose?
Ester had met Chaz within a few months of the miscarriage. He volunteered at Hope Haven, the social services agency where she worked. He had begun there to fulfill Cook County court-mandated service hours, stacking boxes of Nestlé baby formula, sweeping the kitchen, hauling donated clothing, or tending to the tomato garden. One day, he morphed into “sexy” for Ester, and the new perspective stuck—a stubborn optical illusion that would not return to the original image. She endured an invisible, powerful pull on her body toward his whenever they were near each other. The draw only strengthened and became harder to resist each time. Eventually, Chaz occupied what Ester considered an unhealthy number of thinking minutes during the day—too much brain space during and after work. Then he entered shirtless in her dreams, plucking massive, overripe cherry and beefsteak tomatoes off the vine in the community garden, rescuing the ones about to fall, splattering their seeds onto the decaying mulch.
One evening after work, Chaz helped load Ester’s Honda with Pamphlets and swag for a tabling event the following day. They chatted long enough to look into each other’s faces.
“You work a lot,” he said. “We should get lunch tomorrow after you’re done.”
She agreed, and he met her at the Rosalind Community Hospital cafeteria, where she had been answering questions all morning about Hope Haven. Chaz helped her pack her car again, after which they paused and stood face-to-face.
“This might sound like a bad idea, but would you want to kiss me?” Ester asked.
He moved in and pressed his face into hers with a satisfying urgency.
During the drive home, Ester reimagined the kiss from start to finish on repeat. She could finally breathe again.
During the week after their first time in her bed together, Ester’s entire body ached for Chaz. Her physical love sickness and psychological obsession must have been like the heroin withdrawals she had heard described but never experienced. She wanted to float again, shed the heaviness.
“I need you,” she wrote to Chaz. “I want you in my arms tomorrow.” Careful to never add “please” to her texts, Ester worked hard to conceal any hint of desperation. “My favorite thing to think about is our sweet moments together,” she wrote. Or, often, simply, “I want to kiss you.”
“I want to kiss you again.”
“When can I see you for a kiss?”
She regularly woke up in the morning dreaming of kissing Chaz.
He usually responded in kind, but with a longer time lag than Ester liked. She needed him more than he needed her. When he ignored her message for an entire weekend once, Ester forgot to eat and slept fitfully.
When he visited her apartment the following weekend, he passed over the front door threshold, grabbed around her waist with one arm, and took her hair with his other hand, pulling it down while kissing her face, ears, and neck—inhaling her. He never bothered with small talk.
Managing contraception dropped low on Ester’s priority list. Chaz did not visit often enough to warrant a daily dose, she had reasoned. Anyway, he canceled on her almost as often as not. Early on, Ester would sometimes forget that peach-colored pills were made of sugar. Within a few months of their love affair, she started swallowing the little white pills at illogical intervals—on the two days before the day that he might make good on a promise of “X-rated cuddling,” for example.
Chaz had reawakened a sliver of longing in Ester’s mind, one she thought had been laid to rest. Irrational or not, Ester thought Chaz would be a beautiful, if absent, father.
When Chaz visited, he would rub, press, push, devour, suck all the negative emotions from Ester’s body, leaving her numb or nearly content. His presence dominated her thoughts for hours at a stretch, adding an extra challenge to focusing on her administrative duties at Hope Haven. She abandoned perviously held morals and self-respect. A red flag—ignored. He never asked about contraception and canceled plans with barely an apology or would avoid her for days afterward; she didn’t care. Ester wanted him in her bed again.
He had never asked what Ester wanted. He only declared his intentions, not infrequently. Before, when he would whisper in her ear, “I want you to have my baby,” she might reply, “I would love a baby with you,” or “I don’t see why not,” or “It would be so cute, our combination,” masking an undercurrent of doubt with a smooth smile. Could a baby ever materialize from her faulty flesh?
Chaz liked to come over around midday, and Ester had assumed it was because he met her higher-priority girlfriends during the evenings. Why a baby with her anyway? He would never participate in caregiving, would he? Was he nudging his other women, too? Did he have other lovers? And what was that jagged scar that stretched from his right arm’s triceps all the way to his sternum? She had questions, a lot of them, but never dared to ask. Chaz had yanked her out of a near-catatonic state and drew breath into her lungs—he was Narcan to a heroin overdose; glucagon shot to dangerously low blood sugar; defibrillator to cardiac arrest; a holding orange buoy to her leaden, sinking body. He dangled a threadbare lifeline to the world of the living, and she held on.
Ester moved away from Chaz’s embrace, stood up from the bed against the weight of a familiar lethargy, and opened the blinds. The wind chime outside the window tinkled in the gentle breeze, and beyond it in the distance, the southern skyline of Chicago’s business district glimmered. Bright sunlight poured onto the crumpled white sheets and Chaz’s naked body.
“If I got pregnant with you, I would definitely want to keep it,” Ester replied. Whether my body will want to keep this one, she thought, is another story.
Chaz smiled and rested his head on the pillow. “But you wouldn’t want to try for it?” He asked.
A baby with you would be so fun,” she said, “But no, I wouldn’t plan on it. Not now.” Ester leaned down and kissed his cheek. “I’ll shower and then make us some lunch.”
Ester rinsed herself under a hot stream, stepped out of the tub, wrapped her hair in a towel, and applied moisturizer to her face with her nose two inches from the mirror. As the condensation blocking her view faded, the reflection of a pimple emerged. A single chin pimple had become visible since earlier that morning; the definitive sign.
“I knew it,” she said.
That telltale eight-week pimple, which had also presented in the same spot during all three of her previous pregnancies, forced her out of a vague state of denial. She was, without a doubt, newly pregnant. While she had not menstruated for two months and was experiencing all the familiar fatigue and nausea, she had avoided a test.
Being pregnant again did not surprise Ester. Becoming pregnant had been easy while intending to during her brief downhill marriage. Staying pregnant was the problem; always fleeting, gone in a flash, hope and future family down the drain. If her belly grew to a visibly protruding state, she decided, she would tell Chaz.
If her body did not reject—or murder—this one, too, if course she would have the baby.
Ester took the towel off her head and wiped the remaining condensation off the mirror. She studied her clear reflection. The words “baby killer” might as well have been etched across her forehead in charcoal since that was all Ester could see. She placed a hand on her belly. “Make me a liar, baby. I want to meet you.”
El Portal Literary Journal 