Isobel bradshaw
The Vacillator
Her fiancé builds her a nest of blankets in the living room when it gets too hard to move anymore. Shoves the couch up against the wall and drags the cushions onto the floor in a circle, piles every blanket in the house in the middle. Halston tries to protest, reminds him that the doctor had insisted on bed rest now that she’s thirty-four weeks, close enough to full term that she might be able to wait it out, but not close enough to induce delivery yet. The most important part of bed rest, she stresses, is the bed. Getting up and down from the floor every time she has to piss—which is often—is putting undue stress on both her and the baby. As is this argument.
They scream about it for an hour, until she’s red in the face and gripping the edge of the counter to keep herself upright, and then Noah moves all the blankets back to the bed.
She lays there for another two weeks, preeclamptic and dizzy, only getting up to go to the bathroom, or shower every few days, when he feels like helping her. Time blurs. She had the baby shower already, a farce of a thing, little pink onesies and rattles and, from her mother, a teddy bear made out of the blanket she herself had been wrapped in twenty-eight years ago. It should have been a thoughtful gift, and everyone else had crooned over it, proclaimed it the best part of the afternoon. She’d put on a tight smile and excused herself at the earliest possible opportunity to throw up.
Though she hasn’t vomited since, her other symptoms have steadily increased in both frequency and severity as she nears her due date. A sharp pain in her abdomen that comes and goes, wakes her from nightmares of her body ripped apart, shattered on a hospital bed, of the thing that’s eating her from the inside out emerging blood-slick, dragging the placenta across tile flooring and leaving stains that even bleach couldn’t remove. Vision that blurs and refocuses on the figure at the edge of the bed: Noah, the picture of concern, offering her another Gatorade or a meal replacement shake or just a glass of fucking water because she can’t keep living like this, you’re wasting away, think of the baby. As though she’s been doing anything else.
The baby was a mistake. A freak accident, a night of unplanned passion without a condom—the only such night in their two-year relationship, because most of the time he’s Eagle Scout levels of prepared. When she told him, hoping he’d understand why she didn’t want to go through with the pregnancy, he proposed instead. Her family and friends were thrilled. They love him, love his unborn child even more, and she—well, she’s an incubator now. The thought of abortion had never even crossed his mind, even when the doctor warned them of the high risk of complications.
She tried to order the pills herself; the only way she can get them in a state like this. He found them in the mailbox. He’s barely let her out of his sight since.
The preeclampsia is a blessing, in a way. An excuse to rot in the privacy of her own home, to deny visitors. To take things into her own hands. It had started mild, diagnosed at a regular prenatal checkup, and the doctor had warned her to keep an eye on it, recommended bed rest if the numbers on the screen went up, which they did. But none of them know about the other symptoms, because she hasn’t told them. Her private research was extensive and decisive: left untreated, if things keep going this way, it will kill her—which is exactly what she wants.
Her only hope, a roommate from college she’d stayed on good terms with who now lives just over the state line in Chicago, has stopped calling her, sends texts every once in a while, that receive no reply. She doesn’t even know about the baby, because Halston hasn’t told her. Her relationship had been more important, so she’d let that point of contact slip away, and now she’s here: uncomfortably pregnant, surrounded by friends who would never believe her even if she told them the truth. Noah is a wonderful man, they’d say. Why on earth would he force you to keep a baby you didn’t want, especially if you told him you didn’t want it? He’d never do something like that. Look at the two of you. Such a wonderful couple. Such wonderful parents.
It makes her nauseous just to think about, though that could also be the headache, which set in three days ago and has become near-omnipresent, a migraine-level pounding that won’t leave her alone. Another symptom that should warrant emergency intervention, but all she’s done is take more Tylenol than she could, when Noah’s not looking, and lay back down. Try to pay attention to the sound of the TV when it becomes too painful to open her eyes. Ignore the sensation of having a body.
Every time the thing moves, it’s like a bullet wound to her abdomen, a knife in the most tender part of her. The first time she felt it kick, she cried for an hour, more afraid of herself than she’s ever been, because if her own body can betray her like this, what else is it capable of? When she’s laying in bed—alone, because Noah sleeps on the floor now, to give her space but stay close enough to hear her every movement—she pictures it pressing its hands up against the amniotic sac, poking holes with sharp fingernails and flooding her with fluid. Drowning itself. Drowning her.
Only a couple more weeks, he reminds her every day. If she can make it that long, it will be safe to induce with little risk of further complication. But the days creep by and it gets harder to breathe, and she can’t tell if it’s the baby putting pressure on her lungs or the preeclampsia rearing its ugly head again, determined to kill her as much as she’s determined to let it. If she lives they’ll cut her open, numb her from the waist down and slice into her to take it out—or worse, make her deliver naturally, too risky for an epidural, just her and a child and a fountain of blood that won’t clot like it should. Open wounds, burst vessels.
She imagines herself bleeding out in the delivery room. What a perversely comforting thought.
The day before her last appointment, the one that will decide her fate, Noah leaves for his job cleaning the local schools. Second shift, six in the evening to two in the morning, every happy couple’s nightmare. He kisses her on the forehead, leaves a shake and bottle of water on the nightstand, murmurs reminders to call him if anything happens into her hairline. Slams the door behind him when he leaves, so she knows he hasn’t forgotten about the blanket incident. That it will be a while before he forgets.
Every muscle in her body relaxes when he’s gone, the tension in her head released for a blissful few seconds before it ramps right back up. She wants to live forever in those seconds: bright and unfettered, floating above her body before she’s so roughly dropped back into it, into the reality of her distended stomach, fingers so swollen she can’t fit her engagement ring on them anymore, so swollen she doesn’t recognize her hands as her own. When it’s over, she turns from her back onto her left side, the one the doctor told her to lay on, turns up the TV, and drifts in and out of sleep until it’s dark, and she wakes bathed in the light of an infomercial. It’s just after midnight, and she’s slept through his entire shift.
Yawning and squinting, she sits upright; dark spots swim at the corners of her vision. She bites the inside of her cheek hard against the spike in pain, stumbles to the bathroom to piss and throw back a handful of acetaminophen—she doesn’t even bother to count them anymore—from the massive bottle she stashed in the cabinet under the sink. You can’t take ibuprofen when you’re pregnant, Noah had told her when she’d tried to take an Advil for the stomach pain. He’d taken the bottle and hidden it, forcing her to get creative; she’d ordered the Tylenol to be delivered from an open-late pharmacy when he was at work, put them where he won’t look because he doesn’t think she can reach. Once the pills are down, she returns to the bedroom and begins the hunt for clothes that will fit her, shoes she can slip on without worrying about laces.
For months, she’s had only one thought on her mind: she has to leave. And now, she can’t wait any longer.
Noah took a couple of weeks off work when she first got the diagnosis, staying at home to ensure she followed the doctor’s orders, didn’t strain herself, didn’t take too many pills. There’s never alcohol in the house, so he doesn’t have to worry about that, but he stares at her like she thinks any second she’s going to whip out a knife and stab herself with it, rid herself of this burden in the only way that’s left to her. He’d watched as the pills went down the toilet, arms viselike around her chest so she couldn’t even attempt a rescue. She had to watch her escape route, her money, her life, flushed away in the most literal sense. She’d locked herself in the bedroom that night, forced him to break the door down to get to her. It still hasn’t been replaced.
The pills are no longer an option, anyway, for someone as far along as she is, with the complications she has. But there are other ways. Clinics that won’t ask questions if she uses a fake name and pays in cash. She just needs to get one of them.
And what if it’s too late for that? an insidious voice in the back of her head, one that sounds disturbingly like Noah, whispers, but she ignores it.
It’s December, too cold outside for the oversized ten-pack t-shirts she’s been wearing for the past few months, but none of her other clothes fit her, so she grabs one of Noah’s hoodies from the closet, pulls it on and tries not to vomit at the scent—sweat and cigarette smoke and over-scented soap. Jeans under that; the hoodie is big enough that she can get away with not buttoning them. Ankle socks and worn-down slip-on sneakers. She grabs her wallet and shoves it in the hoodie pocket, then spends several minutes on tiptoe trying to reach the emergency cash fund they keep on top of the fridge before she finally gives up and gets a chair. There’s several hundred dollars in it, added to slowly over the course of their relationship, and she doesn’t know if it’ll be enough, but she takes it all anyway. She’ll use her card if she has to. Deal with the consequences later.
Noah always takes her car to work. It’s newer, nicer, Bluetooth-compatible. Normally it annoys her—it’s not like he needs car Bluetooth when he’s at work—but she’s thankful for it now, because the rust-specked Corolla with a cigarette burn in the driver’s seat isn’t going to track her location. Her phone will do that well enough, but if she can make it look like she’s going somewhere else, she can cover up what she’s about to do. Make it look like a tragic accident.
Her head pulses in time with her heartbeat, and she realizes when she reaches up to rub at her eyes that she’s crying. She tries not to make any noise when Noah’s home, shove the pain down, but as she’s easing onto the main road, a thought strikes her: she doesn’t have to anymore. The groan slips out of her automatically, the hurt noises she had to keep in earlier, and she revels in it for a moment, halfway across town, until she stops at a red light outside the church and reaches for her phone.
Leslie picks up on the first ring—a miracle and a kindness Halston doesn’t deserve, considering how long she’s left her hanging, silently rejecting her attempts at a continued friendship. “Hello?” she asks, voice sticking between concern and frustration, and Halston almost starts crying in earnest at the familiarity of it. The timbre of her voice alone has a sedative effect unlike anything she’s ever experienced, stronger than the Tylenol that is only just starting to kick in.
She opens her mouth to speak, lets out a ragged series of shallow breaths instead. The pain in her abdomen grows, blades stuck between her ribs; she shouldn’t be upright for this long, but Chicago, where Leslie lives, is still three hours away by car, so she’ll have to make it work. “Hey,” she says once she’s caught her breath, swallowed down the self-hatred that rises in her at the word. At her own gall, to drop this bombshell with so casual an opening. “I—listen, I’m so sorry to get back in touch with you like this, but I really need your help.”
The words taste wrong in her mouth, though it could very well be her own fear that sours them. The light turns green, and her palms slip over the steering wheel, coated in sweat. She presses on the gas a little too hard, and the car lurches forward, throws her against the constraints of the seatbelt. “Okay,” Leslie says—is saying; it takes a few repetitions before Halston catches it over her own breathing. “Okay. What’s going on?”
All Leslie knows about her life now is what she’s posted on social media: pictures out of context with song-lyric captions, one lie after another about her perfect life, her loving relationship. No mention of the constant arguing that had plagued the time before the baby. Nothing at all about the months since. “I’m pregnant,” she chokes out, pauses to listen to the quiet hiss of the phone on speaker. Thinks about wiretaps, eavesdroppers, and pushes the idea aside. “And I don’t want to be. And I’m on my way to Chicago right now and I—”
Another red light catches her off-guard; she slams on the brakes and the resulting tension against the seatbelt leaves a searing pain in her chest. Leslie is silent the whole time, but after another minute she exhales deep, a gust of wind through the phone, and says “Okay. I can set something up for you, maybe. How far along—I mean, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Too far. Halston swallows back the anxiety, the knowledge that this very well might not work, and tells her the number. Endures another few seconds of humiliating silence before she hears typing on the other end. Pictures Leslie cross-legged on the floor in front of a laptop, open on the coffee table in a featureless room, phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear. “That could be a problem,” she says, her vocal cords frayed under the steady cadence of her voice. “But I’ll do what I can. Are you already on the way?”
“Yes. My—my fiancé’s at work now, so I had to leave before he got back. There’s been…complications. He won’t leave me alone when we’re both home.”
Leslie has never liked Noah. She wasn’t happy to find out they were dating—she called him crass, loud, any other number of insulting adjectives, and said she wouldn’t come to visit for as long as Halston kept him around. That was what started the decline of their friendship; he was all too quick to seize on her unhappiness, twist it so it wasn’t his fault, but rather Leslie’s for being unwilling to put up with him. Miraculously, she doesn’t bring up any of this, only makes a little hum of understanding and continues typing.
“I don’t know if there’s much we can do,” she says after another few minutes, during which Halston leaves the boundaries of town, turns onto a county road that will take her to the interstate. “They might have to induce labor instead of—well. I’m assuming you don’t want to keep it.”
She shakes her head. Feels ridiculous a moment later when she realizes Leslie can’t see her. “No. I don’t. But if that’s what we need to do…I just don’t want him there. I don’t want him involved in any of this.”
“Okay. I’ll schedule something. You still have my address?” After a shaky confirmation that yes, she does, it was what she’d entered into her GPS, she says “Good. I need to hang up for a minute now. Call work, and all that shit. So I can take the time off. Are you going to be okay by yourself for a bit?”
Her head pulses. Her vision blurs in and out of focus; the thing in her belly eats her alive from the inside out. By the time she gets to the Dan Ryan she’ll be a husk of a human, puppeted by her own demon offspring. But she manages a yes anyway, a million thank yous and a weak goodbye. The silence after she hangs up is deafening, more pressure on her eardrums than on any of the organs in her distended abdomen. She’s humming to herself before she even realizes it—tuneless, wordless, a constant stream of little pains, one after the other.
She pauses at a rest stop after an hour of driving, manages to walk inside unaffected, though her hand scrabbles for support along the sleek metal of the stall, seeking purchase she won’t find. Her ragged breathing echoes through the near-empty room, bouncing off the walls, so strained that a pair of boots stops in front of the stall door, like their owner is going to say something, and then moves on. Right, she thinks, reaching for the toilet paper. Suffer in silence. Got it.
When she stands and turns to flush, the catch of her jeans gathered in one hand to stop them from falling back down, there’s blood in the water under her.
She freezes with her free hand outstretched, closes it on empty air. It could be any number of things, and not all of them harmful. It could be the remains of the mucus plug—not the best thing to experience alone on the highway, but not an immediate cause for concern, either, since it wouldn’t automatically indicate the start of labor. It could be anything. But she can’t worry about that now. She needs to get back to the car. Find a town with a hospital, if it comes to that. Her screen flashes with the directions to Leslie’s apartment as she leaves the building, the GPS yelling at her that she needs to course correct. Some kind of fucked up metaphor for her whole life; it would be funny, if her brain hadn’t already begun to convince her that she’s dying.
She merges back onto the highway and reaches for the radio dial, twisting until she lands on a top-40 station and then cranking the volume, gritting her teeth against its loudness. The sound, combined with the uneven pavement, makes her whole body vibrate, takes the pain and builds it to a sweeping crescendo. Maybe she is dying. Maybe she’s having contractions. If this baby comes on the side of the highway with no one to take care of it but her, and she bleeds out, there’s nowhere to place the blame besides squarely on her chest.
Then again, maybe she’s overreacting. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But something in her gut says no, screams urgency, and so she presses down on the gas, watches the needle tick past seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five, nearing ninety when she finally lets up. She should pull over. Call 911. Call Leslie, maybe, and let her know what’s going on. But she keeps driving, not letting her speed drop, because the clock on the dashboard reads 2:18 AM, and Noah will be getting home from work any minute; once he realizes she’s gone, he’ll blow up her phone, call over and over until she can’t ignore it anymore. Track her, if it comes to it. She’s not under the delusion that she’ll be able to fully escape his influence, not right away. She only hopes that, when he finds her and drags her back, she’ll be going alone.
Her breath is picking up again, building to hyperventilation faster than she knows how to control it. All the anxiety-reducing techniques in the world couldn’t have prepared her for something like this, wouldn’t stop her from clenching her teeth together, enamel sloughing off in flakes, from the black spots that have reappeared in her vision, tunneling, encroaching on the road and her peripheral. From the jerk forward in her seat, the punch of an airbag to the face. The smell of smoke.
#
The impact doesn’t cave in her chest, somehow.
She can’t have been out for more than a few seconds, because when she comes to, she’s surrounded by shattered glass, the deflated airbag in front of her. In front of that, the crumpled hood of the car, the concrete barrier in the middle of the highway. She’s jammed into it at an angle, the tail end of the car sticking out into the road. The pain radiating from her stomach spreads outward; she’s terrified to look down, afraid of what she might see: a mess of blood and punctured skin. Tiny scattered limbs.
The light coming from behind her is blinding, a halo in her blurred vision, and for a moment she thinks maybe she actually did die, her unspoken wish comes true, before she realizes it’s the headlights of the car behind her, pulled over with its hazards on. Her phone was catapulted from its clip on the dashboard; she’s got no idea where it is now, so she can only hope they’re calling someone—and that her phone is broken completely. Untraceable. If she’s going to end up at an Indiana hospital, she can at least make sure Noah doesn’t find her.
There’s a pounding to her left that has nothing to do with the agony spiking white-hot through her body: someone at the driver’s side door, trying to avoid the cracked glass that somehow hasn’t shattered all over her. She can’t make out details, only the suggestion of pale skin, dark hair. Leslie, she thinks, half-delirious from the pain. Still, she reaches out with one hand—not looking down—and grabs at the door handle, pulling until it comes loose. The stranger takes over once it’s unlatched, yanks it open the rest of the way—and then steps back, nearly ends up in the road again, tripping over their own feet. When their face finally comes into focus, after a few hard blinks, there’s a look on it that Halston can only think to describe as terror.
Her hand drops back to her side, the sting of the cold hitting her face, making the blood rush to her cheeks. “What is it?” she wants to ask, but when she opens her mouth, the only thing that comes out is a sort of defeated groan, a half-broken noise that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from the mouth of a dying animal. The places where her skin is exposed are freezing, as they should be, but there’s a chill in her abdomen that, between the hoodie and the jeans and the several-pound mass in between the air and her organs, shouldn’t exist. The stranger has their phone pressed to their ear, but Halston can’t make out what they’re saying over the ringing in her ears. She lifts her hand again, slow, brings it to her stomach.
Makes direct contact with a slick of blood, something slippery under her fingertips.
Breaking eye contact, the stranger turns to vomit on the side of the road. Hypnotized by the feel of it, Halston lets her fingers skate over the exposed flesh? Guts? She doesn’t know, and would rather not find out, but the sensation is keeping her from passing out, and right now, that’s all she wants. To stay conscious until the ambulance arrives—because there has to be an ambulance. The stranger was calling one, right? She wants to ask them, but if she opens her mouth, she’ll be sick all over herself, further increasing the risk of contamination that’s already skyrocketed from exposure to the freezing open air. She flattens her hand over her abdomen, forces herself to focus on the pool of vomit a few feet away. Breathes sharp and quick through her nose: in, out, in, out, trying not to smell anything, though the sting of the air is omnipresent and unavoidable.
As the ringing in her ears begins to die down, she realizes the person who stopped is talking to her—has been this whole time, maybe, and she just couldn’t hear it. “There’s help on the way,” they’re saying, voice low and soothing in the same way Leslie’s was earlier, and she latches onto that, throttles it in her mind’s grip. Someone should call Leslie. She’d tell the stranger to, if she could speak, if she could gather her thoughts enough to remember any phone number besides her parents’ landline, ten digits swimming to the front of her mind.
It’s been years since she had a real conversation with them—they hadn’t liked Noah much at first, either, but she hadn’t listened, had insisted he was a good man, and look where that’s gotten her. Stranded on the side of the road, probably dying, maybe not even pregnant anymore. The thought makes her choke out a laugh, though the sound is probably indistinguishable from whatever noise she’s been making this whole time. It’s louder, though, and the stranger stops in the middle of their sentence, stares at her with undisguised terror. Notes, maybe for the first time, the drag of her hand across her abdomen.
“Don’t do that!” they say, lurching forward to break the contact. Their fingers are warm wrapped around Halston’s wrist, grip tight and unyielding despite the fact that blood has soaked her skin. Her mind sticks on the dangers of bloodborne pathogens, the likelihood of contamination. If she gets infected and it kills her, would it be worth it? Would she be content in whatever afterlife there is, knowing that she’s free from the vice grip of motherhood that’s been tightening around her these past seven months?
A few hours ago, she would’ve said yes. Now that she’s faced with the possibility of that dream becoming reality, she doesn’t know anymore.
She sees the lights before she hears the sirens, blending in with the roaring in her ears. Red-white-blue, cycling back and forth, headlights blinding for a second before the ambulance pulls over in front of her, before the back of it opens and out jump half a dozen paramedics, a stretcher unfolding between them. The stranger lets go of her wrist, scrambles out of the way as another pair of headlights—a cop car, maybe even more than one—appear in the shattered remains of her side mirror. She’s surrounded before she can blink, hands on her, an oxygen mask being strapped to her face, though she doesn’t think she needs one. She tries to tell them as much, gestures to the bloody mess of her stomach, but they hold her down just as effectively as the stranger had a moment ago, a task made easier by the way her strength is draining from her.
She catches a few words as they load her into the back of the ambulance. Shrapnel. Labor. Puncture. Through the pressure of hands on her arm, she feels the brief sting of a needle, the chill of medication injected into a vein. Panic surges at the idea of not knowing what they’ll do to her, and she struggles, but she’s getting weaker by the second. It’s not long before she slips away completely.
#
The next time she wakes, it’s to the harsh glow of fluorescents; she squints against the glare, wonders if she can get away with pretending she’s still asleep. But there’s a beeping in her ear, an insistent pulse that keeps time with her heartbeat, and it speeds up as she’s forced further into consciousness, loud and demanding. She keeps her eyes squeezed shut, tries to count her breaths to slow it down, but it’s a hard ask when the ghost of the pain she felt earlier is starting to solidify, originating in her stomach and circling the rest of her body. She wants to scream. If she opens her mouth to scream, she’ll never stop.
“Halston!” a relieved, deep voice says from somewhere to her left; the exclamation is followed by the rustling of fabric, the screech of a chair being dragged across the floor. Her fingers twitch, and she tries to close them around whatever’s under her—sheets, a thin hospital mattress—but she can’t quite get them to move the way she wants, and as she becomes more aware of her body she realizes she’s covered in bandages and tubes. Her arms, her legs, plastic nubs in her nose, blowing cold air, rendering the center of her face numb. Focusing, she can feel the poke of an IV in her right hand, covered in a sticker to hold the cannula tight to her skin.
The vortex of pain, her center of gravity, drowns out any other semblance of feeling—she can’t tell whether or not her stomach is still distended, if she was forced into labor or worse. When she tries to focus on it, the pain shoves her back, throws up a four-story brick wall between her body and her consciousness, renders her mute and dumb. She swallows, winces when saliva scrapes against the back of her dry throat. Opens her eyes.
She’s in a hospital room, as she suspected, but she doesn’t recognize the facility, other than noting it’s bland in the way all hospitals are: light pastel colors, probably a white tile floor. The same as any medical facility, but there’s an air of hostility to it, and she can’t tell whether it’s because of Noah a foot away or her own fear, leaking into the air around her. He looks exactly like he should, which destroys any hope she had left that this is some kind of dream. She looks over at him, takes in the relief on his face, the way he hesitates for a second before reaching over to grab her left hand, cupping it between his own.
“Wh—” She pauses, coughs so hard it makes her body bow forward off the bed. He jumps up, drops her hand to press his palms down on her shoulders, holding her in place. Every cough ramps the pain past the level it’s been sitting steady at for weeks, past whatever it had been at in the wrecked car, to something else entirely, something transcendental. It doesn’t stop when the coughing does, either, but she grits her teeth through it, opens her mouth again. “What happened?”
“You’re going to have to tell me,” he says. His fingers curl, press down harder. A warning disguised as aid. “Because all I know is I got a call from the police, and now I’m here, and our baby is in the NICU. It’s a miracle you’re both alive.”
She doesn’t know what her face looks like—based on how the rest of her feels, she’d rather not know—but whatever horror is there he must mistake for shock, and his grip loosens just enough for her to force her shoulders to relax under him. “Yeah. You’re both alive. And hopefully you can both come home soon, because I’m not going to let either of you out of my sight for a long time.”
Her body shakes. She’s aware of Noah calling her name, taking his hands off her to press the call button, the static buzz of the speaker and the muffled voice of a nurse. She squeezes her eyes shut again, opens them only to let the tears leak out as she hyperventilates. In her mind, she’s back in the car, on the highway in the middle of the night, and Leslie is sitting in her living room, waiting for a visit that will never come. In her mind, she takes a deep breath and jerks the wheel to the right.
They scream about it for an hour, until she’s red in the face and gripping the edge of the counter to keep herself upright, and then Noah moves all the blankets back to the bed.
She lays there for another two weeks, preeclamptic and dizzy, only getting up to go to the bathroom, or shower every few days, when he feels like helping her. Time blurs. She had the baby shower already, a farce of a thing, little pink onesies and rattles and, from her mother, a teddy bear made out of the blanket she herself had been wrapped in twenty-eight years ago. It should have been a thoughtful gift, and everyone else had crooned over it, proclaimed it the best part of the afternoon. She’d put on a tight smile and excused herself at the earliest possible opportunity to throw up.
Though she hasn’t vomited since, her other symptoms have steadily increased in both frequency and severity as she nears her due date. A sharp pain in her abdomen that comes and goes, wakes her from nightmares of her body ripped apart, shattered on a hospital bed, of the thing that’s eating her from the inside out emerging blood-slick, dragging the placenta across tile flooring and leaving stains that even bleach couldn’t remove. Vision that blurs and refocuses on the figure at the edge of the bed: Noah, the picture of concern, offering her another Gatorade or a meal replacement shake or just a glass of fucking water because she can’t keep living like this, you’re wasting away, think of the baby. As though she’s been doing anything else.
The baby was a mistake. A freak accident, a night of unplanned passion without a condom—the only such night in their two-year relationship, because most of the time he’s Eagle Scout levels of prepared. When she told him, hoping he’d understand why she didn’t want to go through with the pregnancy, he proposed instead. Her family and friends were thrilled. They love him, love his unborn child even more, and she—well, she’s an incubator now. The thought of abortion had never even crossed his mind, even when the doctor warned them of the high risk of complications.
She tried to order the pills herself; the only way she can get them in a state like this. He found them in the mailbox. He’s barely let her out of his sight since.
The preeclampsia is a blessing, in a way. An excuse to rot in the privacy of her own home, to deny visitors. To take things into her own hands. It had started mild, diagnosed at a regular prenatal checkup, and the doctor had warned her to keep an eye on it, recommended bed rest if the numbers on the screen went up, which they did. But none of them know about the other symptoms, because she hasn’t told them. Her private research was extensive and decisive: left untreated, if things keep going this way, it will kill her—which is exactly what she wants.
Her only hope, a roommate from college she’d stayed on good terms with who now lives just over the state line in Chicago, has stopped calling her, sends texts every once in a while, that receive no reply. She doesn’t even know about the baby, because Halston hasn’t told her. Her relationship had been more important, so she’d let that point of contact slip away, and now she’s here: uncomfortably pregnant, surrounded by friends who would never believe her even if she told them the truth. Noah is a wonderful man, they’d say. Why on earth would he force you to keep a baby you didn’t want, especially if you told him you didn’t want it? He’d never do something like that. Look at the two of you. Such a wonderful couple. Such wonderful parents.
It makes her nauseous just to think about, though that could also be the headache, which set in three days ago and has become near-omnipresent, a migraine-level pounding that won’t leave her alone. Another symptom that should warrant emergency intervention, but all she’s done is take more Tylenol than she could, when Noah’s not looking, and lay back down. Try to pay attention to the sound of the TV when it becomes too painful to open her eyes. Ignore the sensation of having a body.
Every time the thing moves, it’s like a bullet wound to her abdomen, a knife in the most tender part of her. The first time she felt it kick, she cried for an hour, more afraid of herself than she’s ever been, because if her own body can betray her like this, what else is it capable of? When she’s laying in bed—alone, because Noah sleeps on the floor now, to give her space but stay close enough to hear her every movement—she pictures it pressing its hands up against the amniotic sac, poking holes with sharp fingernails and flooding her with fluid. Drowning itself. Drowning her.
Only a couple more weeks, he reminds her every day. If she can make it that long, it will be safe to induce with little risk of further complication. But the days creep by and it gets harder to breathe, and she can’t tell if it’s the baby putting pressure on her lungs or the preeclampsia rearing its ugly head again, determined to kill her as much as she’s determined to let it. If she lives they’ll cut her open, numb her from the waist down and slice into her to take it out—or worse, make her deliver naturally, too risky for an epidural, just her and a child and a fountain of blood that won’t clot like it should. Open wounds, burst vessels.
She imagines herself bleeding out in the delivery room. What a perversely comforting thought.
The day before her last appointment, the one that will decide her fate, Noah leaves for his job cleaning the local schools. Second shift, six in the evening to two in the morning, every happy couple’s nightmare. He kisses her on the forehead, leaves a shake and bottle of water on the nightstand, murmurs reminders to call him if anything happens into her hairline. Slams the door behind him when he leaves, so she knows he hasn’t forgotten about the blanket incident. That it will be a while before he forgets.
Every muscle in her body relaxes when he’s gone, the tension in her head released for a blissful few seconds before it ramps right back up. She wants to live forever in those seconds: bright and unfettered, floating above her body before she’s so roughly dropped back into it, into the reality of her distended stomach, fingers so swollen she can’t fit her engagement ring on them anymore, so swollen she doesn’t recognize her hands as her own. When it’s over, she turns from her back onto her left side, the one the doctor told her to lay on, turns up the TV, and drifts in and out of sleep until it’s dark, and she wakes bathed in the light of an infomercial. It’s just after midnight, and she’s slept through his entire shift.
Yawning and squinting, she sits upright; dark spots swim at the corners of her vision. She bites the inside of her cheek hard against the spike in pain, stumbles to the bathroom to piss and throw back a handful of acetaminophen—she doesn’t even bother to count them anymore—from the massive bottle she stashed in the cabinet under the sink. You can’t take ibuprofen when you’re pregnant, Noah had told her when she’d tried to take an Advil for the stomach pain. He’d taken the bottle and hidden it, forcing her to get creative; she’d ordered the Tylenol to be delivered from an open-late pharmacy when he was at work, put them where he won’t look because he doesn’t think she can reach. Once the pills are down, she returns to the bedroom and begins the hunt for clothes that will fit her, shoes she can slip on without worrying about laces.
For months, she’s had only one thought on her mind: she has to leave. And now, she can’t wait any longer.
Noah took a couple of weeks off work when she first got the diagnosis, staying at home to ensure she followed the doctor’s orders, didn’t strain herself, didn’t take too many pills. There’s never alcohol in the house, so he doesn’t have to worry about that, but he stares at her like she thinks any second she’s going to whip out a knife and stab herself with it, rid herself of this burden in the only way that’s left to her. He’d watched as the pills went down the toilet, arms viselike around her chest so she couldn’t even attempt a rescue. She had to watch her escape route, her money, her life, flushed away in the most literal sense. She’d locked herself in the bedroom that night, forced him to break the door down to get to her. It still hasn’t been replaced.
The pills are no longer an option, anyway, for someone as far along as she is, with the complications she has. But there are other ways. Clinics that won’t ask questions if she uses a fake name and pays in cash. She just needs to get one of them.
And what if it’s too late for that? an insidious voice in the back of her head, one that sounds disturbingly like Noah, whispers, but she ignores it.
It’s December, too cold outside for the oversized ten-pack t-shirts she’s been wearing for the past few months, but none of her other clothes fit her, so she grabs one of Noah’s hoodies from the closet, pulls it on and tries not to vomit at the scent—sweat and cigarette smoke and over-scented soap. Jeans under that; the hoodie is big enough that she can get away with not buttoning them. Ankle socks and worn-down slip-on sneakers. She grabs her wallet and shoves it in the hoodie pocket, then spends several minutes on tiptoe trying to reach the emergency cash fund they keep on top of the fridge before she finally gives up and gets a chair. There’s several hundred dollars in it, added to slowly over the course of their relationship, and she doesn’t know if it’ll be enough, but she takes it all anyway. She’ll use her card if she has to. Deal with the consequences later.
Noah always takes her car to work. It’s newer, nicer, Bluetooth-compatible. Normally it annoys her—it’s not like he needs car Bluetooth when he’s at work—but she’s thankful for it now, because the rust-specked Corolla with a cigarette burn in the driver’s seat isn’t going to track her location. Her phone will do that well enough, but if she can make it look like she’s going somewhere else, she can cover up what she’s about to do. Make it look like a tragic accident.
Her head pulses in time with her heartbeat, and she realizes when she reaches up to rub at her eyes that she’s crying. She tries not to make any noise when Noah’s home, shove the pain down, but as she’s easing onto the main road, a thought strikes her: she doesn’t have to anymore. The groan slips out of her automatically, the hurt noises she had to keep in earlier, and she revels in it for a moment, halfway across town, until she stops at a red light outside the church and reaches for her phone.
Leslie picks up on the first ring—a miracle and a kindness Halston doesn’t deserve, considering how long she’s left her hanging, silently rejecting her attempts at a continued friendship. “Hello?” she asks, voice sticking between concern and frustration, and Halston almost starts crying in earnest at the familiarity of it. The timbre of her voice alone has a sedative effect unlike anything she’s ever experienced, stronger than the Tylenol that is only just starting to kick in.
She opens her mouth to speak, lets out a ragged series of shallow breaths instead. The pain in her abdomen grows, blades stuck between her ribs; she shouldn’t be upright for this long, but Chicago, where Leslie lives, is still three hours away by car, so she’ll have to make it work. “Hey,” she says once she’s caught her breath, swallowed down the self-hatred that rises in her at the word. At her own gall, to drop this bombshell with so casual an opening. “I—listen, I’m so sorry to get back in touch with you like this, but I really need your help.”
The words taste wrong in her mouth, though it could very well be her own fear that sours them. The light turns green, and her palms slip over the steering wheel, coated in sweat. She presses on the gas a little too hard, and the car lurches forward, throws her against the constraints of the seatbelt. “Okay,” Leslie says—is saying; it takes a few repetitions before Halston catches it over her own breathing. “Okay. What’s going on?”
All Leslie knows about her life now is what she’s posted on social media: pictures out of context with song-lyric captions, one lie after another about her perfect life, her loving relationship. No mention of the constant arguing that had plagued the time before the baby. Nothing at all about the months since. “I’m pregnant,” she chokes out, pauses to listen to the quiet hiss of the phone on speaker. Thinks about wiretaps, eavesdroppers, and pushes the idea aside. “And I don’t want to be. And I’m on my way to Chicago right now and I—”
Another red light catches her off-guard; she slams on the brakes and the resulting tension against the seatbelt leaves a searing pain in her chest. Leslie is silent the whole time, but after another minute she exhales deep, a gust of wind through the phone, and says “Okay. I can set something up for you, maybe. How far along—I mean, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Too far. Halston swallows back the anxiety, the knowledge that this very well might not work, and tells her the number. Endures another few seconds of humiliating silence before she hears typing on the other end. Pictures Leslie cross-legged on the floor in front of a laptop, open on the coffee table in a featureless room, phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear. “That could be a problem,” she says, her vocal cords frayed under the steady cadence of her voice. “But I’ll do what I can. Are you already on the way?”
“Yes. My—my fiancé’s at work now, so I had to leave before he got back. There’s been…complications. He won’t leave me alone when we’re both home.”
Leslie has never liked Noah. She wasn’t happy to find out they were dating—she called him crass, loud, any other number of insulting adjectives, and said she wouldn’t come to visit for as long as Halston kept him around. That was what started the decline of their friendship; he was all too quick to seize on her unhappiness, twist it so it wasn’t his fault, but rather Leslie’s for being unwilling to put up with him. Miraculously, she doesn’t bring up any of this, only makes a little hum of understanding and continues typing.
“I don’t know if there’s much we can do,” she says after another few minutes, during which Halston leaves the boundaries of town, turns onto a county road that will take her to the interstate. “They might have to induce labor instead of—well. I’m assuming you don’t want to keep it.”
She shakes her head. Feels ridiculous a moment later when she realizes Leslie can’t see her. “No. I don’t. But if that’s what we need to do…I just don’t want him there. I don’t want him involved in any of this.”
“Okay. I’ll schedule something. You still have my address?” After a shaky confirmation that yes, she does, it was what she’d entered into her GPS, she says “Good. I need to hang up for a minute now. Call work, and all that shit. So I can take the time off. Are you going to be okay by yourself for a bit?”
Her head pulses. Her vision blurs in and out of focus; the thing in her belly eats her alive from the inside out. By the time she gets to the Dan Ryan she’ll be a husk of a human, puppeted by her own demon offspring. But she manages a yes anyway, a million thank yous and a weak goodbye. The silence after she hangs up is deafening, more pressure on her eardrums than on any of the organs in her distended abdomen. She’s humming to herself before she even realizes it—tuneless, wordless, a constant stream of little pains, one after the other.
She pauses at a rest stop after an hour of driving, manages to walk inside unaffected, though her hand scrabbles for support along the sleek metal of the stall, seeking purchase she won’t find. Her ragged breathing echoes through the near-empty room, bouncing off the walls, so strained that a pair of boots stops in front of the stall door, like their owner is going to say something, and then moves on. Right, she thinks, reaching for the toilet paper. Suffer in silence. Got it.
When she stands and turns to flush, the catch of her jeans gathered in one hand to stop them from falling back down, there’s blood in the water under her.
She freezes with her free hand outstretched, closes it on empty air. It could be any number of things, and not all of them harmful. It could be the remains of the mucus plug—not the best thing to experience alone on the highway, but not an immediate cause for concern, either, since it wouldn’t automatically indicate the start of labor. It could be anything. But she can’t worry about that now. She needs to get back to the car. Find a town with a hospital, if it comes to that. Her screen flashes with the directions to Leslie’s apartment as she leaves the building, the GPS yelling at her that she needs to course correct. Some kind of fucked up metaphor for her whole life; it would be funny, if her brain hadn’t already begun to convince her that she’s dying.
She merges back onto the highway and reaches for the radio dial, twisting until she lands on a top-40 station and then cranking the volume, gritting her teeth against its loudness. The sound, combined with the uneven pavement, makes her whole body vibrate, takes the pain and builds it to a sweeping crescendo. Maybe she is dying. Maybe she’s having contractions. If this baby comes on the side of the highway with no one to take care of it but her, and she bleeds out, there’s nowhere to place the blame besides squarely on her chest.
Then again, maybe she’s overreacting. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. But something in her gut says no, screams urgency, and so she presses down on the gas, watches the needle tick past seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five, nearing ninety when she finally lets up. She should pull over. Call 911. Call Leslie, maybe, and let her know what’s going on. But she keeps driving, not letting her speed drop, because the clock on the dashboard reads 2:18 AM, and Noah will be getting home from work any minute; once he realizes she’s gone, he’ll blow up her phone, call over and over until she can’t ignore it anymore. Track her, if it comes to it. She’s not under the delusion that she’ll be able to fully escape his influence, not right away. She only hopes that, when he finds her and drags her back, she’ll be going alone.
Her breath is picking up again, building to hyperventilation faster than she knows how to control it. All the anxiety-reducing techniques in the world couldn’t have prepared her for something like this, wouldn’t stop her from clenching her teeth together, enamel sloughing off in flakes, from the black spots that have reappeared in her vision, tunneling, encroaching on the road and her peripheral. From the jerk forward in her seat, the punch of an airbag to the face. The smell of smoke.
#
The impact doesn’t cave in her chest, somehow.
She can’t have been out for more than a few seconds, because when she comes to, she’s surrounded by shattered glass, the deflated airbag in front of her. In front of that, the crumpled hood of the car, the concrete barrier in the middle of the highway. She’s jammed into it at an angle, the tail end of the car sticking out into the road. The pain radiating from her stomach spreads outward; she’s terrified to look down, afraid of what she might see: a mess of blood and punctured skin. Tiny scattered limbs.
The light coming from behind her is blinding, a halo in her blurred vision, and for a moment she thinks maybe she actually did die, her unspoken wish comes true, before she realizes it’s the headlights of the car behind her, pulled over with its hazards on. Her phone was catapulted from its clip on the dashboard; she’s got no idea where it is now, so she can only hope they’re calling someone—and that her phone is broken completely. Untraceable. If she’s going to end up at an Indiana hospital, she can at least make sure Noah doesn’t find her.
There’s a pounding to her left that has nothing to do with the agony spiking white-hot through her body: someone at the driver’s side door, trying to avoid the cracked glass that somehow hasn’t shattered all over her. She can’t make out details, only the suggestion of pale skin, dark hair. Leslie, she thinks, half-delirious from the pain. Still, she reaches out with one hand—not looking down—and grabs at the door handle, pulling until it comes loose. The stranger takes over once it’s unlatched, yanks it open the rest of the way—and then steps back, nearly ends up in the road again, tripping over their own feet. When their face finally comes into focus, after a few hard blinks, there’s a look on it that Halston can only think to describe as terror.
Her hand drops back to her side, the sting of the cold hitting her face, making the blood rush to her cheeks. “What is it?” she wants to ask, but when she opens her mouth, the only thing that comes out is a sort of defeated groan, a half-broken noise that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from the mouth of a dying animal. The places where her skin is exposed are freezing, as they should be, but there’s a chill in her abdomen that, between the hoodie and the jeans and the several-pound mass in between the air and her organs, shouldn’t exist. The stranger has their phone pressed to their ear, but Halston can’t make out what they’re saying over the ringing in her ears. She lifts her hand again, slow, brings it to her stomach.
Makes direct contact with a slick of blood, something slippery under her fingertips.
Breaking eye contact, the stranger turns to vomit on the side of the road. Hypnotized by the feel of it, Halston lets her fingers skate over the exposed flesh? Guts? She doesn’t know, and would rather not find out, but the sensation is keeping her from passing out, and right now, that’s all she wants. To stay conscious until the ambulance arrives—because there has to be an ambulance. The stranger was calling one, right? She wants to ask them, but if she opens her mouth, she’ll be sick all over herself, further increasing the risk of contamination that’s already skyrocketed from exposure to the freezing open air. She flattens her hand over her abdomen, forces herself to focus on the pool of vomit a few feet away. Breathes sharp and quick through her nose: in, out, in, out, trying not to smell anything, though the sting of the air is omnipresent and unavoidable.
As the ringing in her ears begins to die down, she realizes the person who stopped is talking to her—has been this whole time, maybe, and she just couldn’t hear it. “There’s help on the way,” they’re saying, voice low and soothing in the same way Leslie’s was earlier, and she latches onto that, throttles it in her mind’s grip. Someone should call Leslie. She’d tell the stranger to, if she could speak, if she could gather her thoughts enough to remember any phone number besides her parents’ landline, ten digits swimming to the front of her mind.
It’s been years since she had a real conversation with them—they hadn’t liked Noah much at first, either, but she hadn’t listened, had insisted he was a good man, and look where that’s gotten her. Stranded on the side of the road, probably dying, maybe not even pregnant anymore. The thought makes her choke out a laugh, though the sound is probably indistinguishable from whatever noise she’s been making this whole time. It’s louder, though, and the stranger stops in the middle of their sentence, stares at her with undisguised terror. Notes, maybe for the first time, the drag of her hand across her abdomen.
“Don’t do that!” they say, lurching forward to break the contact. Their fingers are warm wrapped around Halston’s wrist, grip tight and unyielding despite the fact that blood has soaked her skin. Her mind sticks on the dangers of bloodborne pathogens, the likelihood of contamination. If she gets infected and it kills her, would it be worth it? Would she be content in whatever afterlife there is, knowing that she’s free from the vice grip of motherhood that’s been tightening around her these past seven months?
A few hours ago, she would’ve said yes. Now that she’s faced with the possibility of that dream becoming reality, she doesn’t know anymore.
She sees the lights before she hears the sirens, blending in with the roaring in her ears. Red-white-blue, cycling back and forth, headlights blinding for a second before the ambulance pulls over in front of her, before the back of it opens and out jump half a dozen paramedics, a stretcher unfolding between them. The stranger lets go of her wrist, scrambles out of the way as another pair of headlights—a cop car, maybe even more than one—appear in the shattered remains of her side mirror. She’s surrounded before she can blink, hands on her, an oxygen mask being strapped to her face, though she doesn’t think she needs one. She tries to tell them as much, gestures to the bloody mess of her stomach, but they hold her down just as effectively as the stranger had a moment ago, a task made easier by the way her strength is draining from her.
She catches a few words as they load her into the back of the ambulance. Shrapnel. Labor. Puncture. Through the pressure of hands on her arm, she feels the brief sting of a needle, the chill of medication injected into a vein. Panic surges at the idea of not knowing what they’ll do to her, and she struggles, but she’s getting weaker by the second. It’s not long before she slips away completely.
#
The next time she wakes, it’s to the harsh glow of fluorescents; she squints against the glare, wonders if she can get away with pretending she’s still asleep. But there’s a beeping in her ear, an insistent pulse that keeps time with her heartbeat, and it speeds up as she’s forced further into consciousness, loud and demanding. She keeps her eyes squeezed shut, tries to count her breaths to slow it down, but it’s a hard ask when the ghost of the pain she felt earlier is starting to solidify, originating in her stomach and circling the rest of her body. She wants to scream. If she opens her mouth to scream, she’ll never stop.
“Halston!” a relieved, deep voice says from somewhere to her left; the exclamation is followed by the rustling of fabric, the screech of a chair being dragged across the floor. Her fingers twitch, and she tries to close them around whatever’s under her—sheets, a thin hospital mattress—but she can’t quite get them to move the way she wants, and as she becomes more aware of her body she realizes she’s covered in bandages and tubes. Her arms, her legs, plastic nubs in her nose, blowing cold air, rendering the center of her face numb. Focusing, she can feel the poke of an IV in her right hand, covered in a sticker to hold the cannula tight to her skin.
The vortex of pain, her center of gravity, drowns out any other semblance of feeling—she can’t tell whether or not her stomach is still distended, if she was forced into labor or worse. When she tries to focus on it, the pain shoves her back, throws up a four-story brick wall between her body and her consciousness, renders her mute and dumb. She swallows, winces when saliva scrapes against the back of her dry throat. Opens her eyes.
She’s in a hospital room, as she suspected, but she doesn’t recognize the facility, other than noting it’s bland in the way all hospitals are: light pastel colors, probably a white tile floor. The same as any medical facility, but there’s an air of hostility to it, and she can’t tell whether it’s because of Noah a foot away or her own fear, leaking into the air around her. He looks exactly like he should, which destroys any hope she had left that this is some kind of dream. She looks over at him, takes in the relief on his face, the way he hesitates for a second before reaching over to grab her left hand, cupping it between his own.
“Wh—” She pauses, coughs so hard it makes her body bow forward off the bed. He jumps up, drops her hand to press his palms down on her shoulders, holding her in place. Every cough ramps the pain past the level it’s been sitting steady at for weeks, past whatever it had been at in the wrecked car, to something else entirely, something transcendental. It doesn’t stop when the coughing does, either, but she grits her teeth through it, opens her mouth again. “What happened?”
“You’re going to have to tell me,” he says. His fingers curl, press down harder. A warning disguised as aid. “Because all I know is I got a call from the police, and now I’m here, and our baby is in the NICU. It’s a miracle you’re both alive.”
She doesn’t know what her face looks like—based on how the rest of her feels, she’d rather not know—but whatever horror is there he must mistake for shock, and his grip loosens just enough for her to force her shoulders to relax under him. “Yeah. You’re both alive. And hopefully you can both come home soon, because I’m not going to let either of you out of my sight for a long time.”
Her body shakes. She’s aware of Noah calling her name, taking his hands off her to press the call button, the static buzz of the speaker and the muffled voice of a nurse. She squeezes her eyes shut again, opens them only to let the tears leak out as she hyperventilates. In her mind, she’s back in the car, on the highway in the middle of the night, and Leslie is sitting in her living room, waiting for a visit that will never come. In her mind, she takes a deep breath and jerks the wheel to the right.
Isobel Bradshaw is a queer and disabled author of fiction and hybrid work focusing on themes of religious trauma, queerness, and ownership of one's body, as well as the ways in which all of these interact. She has a BFA in Creative Writing and lives in the Midwest with her partner and cats. She can be found on Instagram @girlprometheus and Bluesky @girlprometheus.bsky.social.
