Gregory By Sierra Clark
Before you ever had sex and were into your first relationship, you used to picture the ultrasound for your first child. How you’d point, What’s that right there? What’s wrong with my baby? You came to the knowledge long ago: life never happens the way you anticipate it will. Your baby should’ve had a head. In the reproductive graphics, part of that bundle of cells later becomes a head. When you saw the little boy in your uterus, you just knew. Knew everything. Fear for your future caught in your throat. You sunk your fingers into the squish around your knee caps, a tic you had lost sight of at fourteen years old, but you were looking at your baby. The poppy red acrylic on your pinky broke off in the clean-shaven skin around your knee. You turned your gaze to the space above the doctor’s head. The doctor fiddled with equipment and the headless baby inside of you kicked. You were trying not to look, but you saw in your peripheral, the corresponding kick on the ultrasound screen. A rodent’s screeching tumbled from your mouth like sticky ice cubes. The doctor looked stricken. Not at the screen, but at you, the woman forced to nourish an honest-to-god monster. He put the phone down and shushed you hesitantly, brows furrowed. Why on earth are you acting so crazy? “I’m just explaining your situation, Ms. Baker. Help is coming.” He murmurs back into the phone. If any woman out there is rabid, it’s definitely you. Nurses rush in. A man in baby-green scrubs rubs circles on the back of your hand, while he tells you about the anxiety he and his wife faced when their daughter was a baby. A heavy-set woman extracts your acrylic nail from your knee, disinfects, and bandages the wound. You want to stop screaming as much as everybody else wants you to, but for that to happen, your baby needs to become one that the world is familiar with. And you want to say this, but your fetus is playing keep-away with your vocal chords. You are strapped to a gurney. The nurse in green wheels you to the psychiatric ward. For three days, until your grandmother can check you out, you are told by counselors that your baby will be just fine. It was a shadow in the uterus that caused your child to look like he had no head. It’s important to avoid stress when you’re pregnant. Just take a few deep breaths. Inhale oxygen all the way down to your belly. On the second check-up, with a different set of equipment, your son is still headless. You are transferred to a specialty maternity department. The doctors run tests for rare birth defects. Your son could have a new mutation. And they say it’s unlikely, but they ask if you want to test again for Down syndrome. You tell them a baby with Down syndrome is a baby you could love. You get three skeptical looks and immediately walk out, muttering about dehumanizing treatment. If only your baby didn’t have a healthy heartbeat. After you finish labor, doctors knock you out cold. The hospital detains your baby from you for three days and staff won’t answer your questions. Before they let you hold your baby, you mark all the right boxes on the questionnaire, make all the right eye contact. You name your baby “Gregory.” Gregory’s body is otherwise normal. No head, but no eyes, nose, ears, or mouth either. They diagnose you with postpartum depression the second a tear rolls into the fist punch hole where his neck should start. You don’t know for sure, but you do. You heard the pen click in the corner. Your grandma saw it too. No one warned you about Gregory’s cry. That booming surround-sound, a threat to char only your insides with a bolt of lightning. A sound too old for a body that small. In that moment, you want the sterile floor to take Gregory. Take him hard. But you do not want to drop him. *** Not only your state, but the states that border it, and the states that border those states cover Gregory’s birth cry on local news and radio. Much to your horror, Gregory’s birth becomes international news. You get phone calls and emails from journalists and the occasional lawyer too. At first you oblige, answering the calls, reading the emails and hardcopy letters over and over. But you never respond, and soon they stop. 56
