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.

Your grandma gets you a job at Dillard’s, since she is a retired manager there, and you work ten-hour days back to back until your grandma tells you how selfish you are.

One rainy Saturday morning, you sit back with your grandma on the green couch that you used to call the booger couch; it was so old. You’ve grown tired of bouncing Greg, so you lean back, holding him in place on your belly. If he had a head, it would be nestled between your breasts. His steady whine is like a billion particle-size buzzards, bouncing between you and the mildewed wallpaper. The same volume no matter how you move your head or feet. Greg is seven months old. And at this point, you don’t listen to the TV until your grandma hurriedly slaps at your thigh. “Listen,” she says. “Just look at it.”

A stupid-wealthy young woman in New Zealand just yesterday birthed a healthy headless daughter. The woman on screen nodded in conversation. So, to get the ball rolling, Heidi, I would like to know where you stand in your emotions. How did you feel once you learned that Lorma wouldn’t have a head?

“Hey, that’s a good question. I admit, after the first ultrasound, I cried for my daughter. Because no one knows anything about childhood problems with this disorder. This disorder that barely has a name. Obviously, Lorma will need to work extra hard to gain friends and acceptance. But I feel that with a resilient spirit and the help of my family, I can really build my daughter up to be the best that she can be.” The reporter smiled warmly.

Heidi, you are commendable. Is your family very supportive?

“Oh, absolutely. Mom would go anywhere with me, and dad is a phone call away. He works quite a bit. But that really doesn’t take him away enough to hurt. And I go off to the summer house all the time with my cousins. I feel like I can count on everybody.”

And how does Lorma eat?

“For now, a needle in her arm. Lorma’s pediatrician taught me how to feed her. They want to do more tests before we start trying to feed her through her neck hole—”

Your grandma turns the TV off. “Well, that mother sure is luckier than you.” Her bones creaked as she rose from the couch. “You want more coffee?” You ask for a Monster. Greg wails.

On Sunday evening a week later, you receive an email marked “Important.” It’s from Heidi Jones. She wants Lorma and Greg to grow up together. “Let me know if you like the idea. My mom and I can move near you.” You tell your grandma that Heidi is way too plucky to be anywhere near you. You’d just vomit.

“You could learn from her. Hell, I’d like seeing her rub off on you. Agree to it for now, and if it don’t work out, she can always pack up and go back to New Zealand.” But if you’re being completely honest, you think everything could go horribly wrong. You think Greg might hurt Lorma when they get older. That he will deliberately boom his surround-sound voice louder over hers. That he will measure his upper body strength against hers. And then you wonder if you yourself will wind up breaking Heidi’s arm or something like that. Because if Greg came from you, then what are you really like? But within four years, Heidi moves to the U.S. She lives in a mini mansion down the road from your trailer park. You think her determination to make this work will be her downfall. You think she can’t sense danger. You think too much. Heidi enrolls Lorma in Greg’s kindergarten class. It’s important for her daughter to see all different walks of life.

At the parent-teacher conference, Miss Parker tells you that Gregory has been really quite lonely for most of the school year. “I’m sure you understand, Ms. Baker, but the other children were afraid of Gregory at first. I don’t know how else to put it. Even that other headless child played with everybody else.” She smiles, fiddles with the Winnie-the-Pooh on her t-shirt. “But then a first grade child bit him in the car-rider line, and the others started biting him too! But Lorma came to his rescue. She’s sweet when you get used to the headless part. The other staff agree that she really empathizes with Gregory.” Miss Parker held her hands out like she was defending herself. “No fear, no more!”

“Riiiight?” You say. You quit your acrylic nails because the desire to overcompensate was too much pressure on top of raising a headless child. But now you want them back. In obsidian. “So Greg’s doing well with his peers?”

“I wouldn’t say everything’s great, but he’s getting there.” You are too tired and too jealous to count this as progress.

You come home to find Greg tracing with his play-dough smelling fingers along the fissures that make up the sunken spot where Lorma’s neck would be. You are horrified. Heidi is there. She holds creased papers to her chest, and holds an envelope out to you.

“Oh, don’t be too worried about that at all! The kids have been feeling that spot on each other all afternoon.” You take in her soft pink lipstick and tailored emerald sundress. She emphasizes the envelope. “Some biologists want to know how Greg’s and Lorma’s five senses operate. I’d like to learn. What do you think, Janey?”

Your grandma wants you to agree, no questions asked. But you already know. Greg has a god’s-eye view. He looks down on you. From the ceiling, or the sky. You say that no, Greg will not take part. Part of you is too afraid of more knowledge about Greg. Another part of you suspects that scientists will realize how demented he is and take him away from you. Then, he could hurt people in whatever home they put him in. You catch Greg’s attention. He is shirtless. His vision zeros in on you. He booms, “Mom, I want some apple juice.”

You grimace to think of apple juice evaporating after pooling in his fist-punch hole of a neck. From a convenience store two towns away, you can still hear him: “MOM, I WANT SOME APPLE JUICE.”

***

Greg is in fifth grade. It’s March, and the cool kids in his class are dating each other. So naturally, he wants to date a girl. A girl with a head, even though sweet Lorma is in his class too. You are relieved, even if you feel that if you let out the breath you’ve been holding since he was in kindergarten, he will really see his full potential as a satanic child. But Lorma is safe! And that girl with a head would never agree to date him, you tell yourself. And the girl really doesn’t. But for a week after this incident, Greg blames you. Stomps into the house, his stomps almost as loud as his “inside voice.” He says, “I KNOW what you are doing, MOM. And it’s not FUNNY.” In response to Greg’s enormous volume, the double wides on either side of you blare their music. To your left, Skillet, to your right, Death Grips.

You just got home from a late shift. Your grandma and Greg sit in the kitchen with clean plates. You had expected to clean up globs of potato from the floor around Greg’s seat, but it seems they waited for you. “MOM. Are you HUNGRY?”

“No, Gregory, I’m not.”

“Janey, he seems to think that he gets nourishment from us eating communion wafers and drinking wine.”

“I’M Jesus reincarnate,” Greg booms.

“No, you’re not.”

“Eat your wafer, MOM.”

You eat the wafer. Gregory takes a deep breath. “Thank you, MOM. My skin is like SATIN, now that YOU’VE EATEN your WAFER.” ***

By the time they are fourteen, Lorma has completely distanced herself from Greg, so your grandma pitches in with you to buy him a game console. He likes Call of Duty and asks you if it’s possible for him to shoot the head off his own character, even though he knows that you wouldn’t know the answer.

For his fifteenth birthday, he wants to invite Lorma and a few other girls. “NONE of those CHADS,” he booms. You and your grandmother submit to this, knowing that none of them would show up. They don’t. So you find him on his bed in his room with a fine line sharpie and one of those sex dolls that have no head, arms, or legs. You are mortified, and want to know how he got it.

“LORMA HAS a wasp-shaped birthmark on her right AAASS cheek,” he says. And you know this isn’t true, Heidi would have told you. So you close his door. You are losing your nerve. The next day is Sunday, and he sets YouTube up on his Xbox to his favorite band. Your grandma is going out, and offers to take you with.

“You need to get away from that psycho,” she tells you. But you stay home. You tell your grandmother it’s safer that way. For the world. For the rest of the day, the volume of Mötley Crüe goes up, and the volume of Greg’s voice presses down, down, down onto you.

“Girls, girls, girls. GIRLS, GIRLS, GORLES!” At six-thirty, you get a call on the home phone from the county police. Your grandmother was t-boned and in critical condition. Anyone in the passenger seat would have died, but grandma stays in the hospital for a few months. A year after returning home, she dies of complications.

You get promoted to manager at Dillard’s and rent a two-bedroom house in a sunny part of town down the road from a school you would have gone to had your parents lived. The most irritating thing about your life now is that the old lady living next to you knocks on your door and tells you that you need to “call your son, Janey, and tell him to be quiet, and stay in his home more often. You worked hard to get him that little trailer home, and he needs to stay inside, don’t you know?” But what you know is that you did not get him his trailer, or anything in it. You were relieved, and at the same time scared when he graduated and took his “gap year,” which actually meant he went to work as a door-to-door debt collector. You haven’t seen him lately, but sometimes between two-thirty and four a.m., his laughter simmers beneath the street noises.

Heidi’s been planning a party at her vacation home in Florida but is torn between keeping the date for a year from now or moving it up. The party is for Lorma to give her forthcoming speech, and announce a book deal. “But she’s been having these voice troubles, Janey,” Heidi says. Heidi sits in the other velvet green armchair across from you, fingers tucked under her thighs so they don’t flutter. “She can’t get loud. When she was little, I could hear her whisper from out in the garden. And she was in the house.”

“That’s odd, Heidi,” you say. “Has she gone to the doctor?” You wonder if Greg’s quieted. You smile with half of your mouth. Greg’s early morning laughter could stand to be much louder than it is. And he’s stopped screaming for you from his home across town. Maybe it’s because he’s quieter now, because he has nothing to gloat over.

“Yes, but doctors brush her off because she doesn’t have a physical mouth, or anything really, where speech comes out.”

“I’m so sorry, Heidi. Lorma doesn’t deserve that.”

Heidi is silent for a while. The clock ticks, and you pick at a square of prosciutto and green olive that you and Heidi had put together two hours ago.

“I asked Lorma when it started, if she ever tried to eat the way Greg does. She physically balked at me. That was the last time I saw her.”

It’s April, 2029. You celebrate Easter with your favorite novel and fried chicken take-out. At three, your phone rings–an unknown number. On a whim, you answer, and it’s Gregory. You can simultaneously hear his voice that everyone else in town hears, and his over-the-phone voice, which you are sure your neighbors can hear too. He tells you, and 10,000 other people, that you should visit him. You oblige, as apprehensive as you are. He picks you up the next day and takes you to Waffle House. He rolls his pancake up and dips it in your coffee. Greg ignores you when you ask how work is going. “Greg, your door-to-door debt collecting job, how’s that going?”

Behind the Waffle House, Greg punches the driver side window out of an old white truck, and unlocked the passenger side door. “Get inside, MOM.” And you do, reassuring yourself that the day will eventually end with you at home, reading a regency romance. He drives through the woods behind a storage business. You wonder why no one has been alerted but chalk it up to law enforcement’s fear of him. The ride is silent, except for when he says, “MOM, MOM? YOU and ME are built LIKE TRUCKS.” Then he stops. Through the trees, you see a small log cabin. It looks like it’s big enough for only one room. A trail of animal hair and bones leads to his front door.

You and Greg are sitting at a table in the middle of his cabin, playing Monopoly. You are about to secure Boardwalk when he gets up from the table. “Did you notice?” Greg booms.

“Notice what?”

“I’ve learned how to concentrate my voice. MOM.” Your breath is shallow when Greg hugs you from behind. “NOW, no ONE hears me but YOU.” A sticky, sharp wetness rings in your ears, and you fall to the dirt floor. Greg takes a rifle from under a mattress in the corner and leaves without a word. You don’t hear an engine rev, but through tears, you watch him leave from out the torn screen window.

In the afternoon the following day, teenagers break down Greg’s door. They know who you are. You’re hell spawn’s mother. They call the cops. In an interrogation room, it takes them three hours to figure out that you can’t hear. You are driven to the hospital, where after four days, a nurse gives you a local newspaper. Greg killed fifty-one people at his old high school.

Lorma gives condolences over social media right after the massacres, and then her accounts go silent in sympathy for the families of killed students. You read in an article she wrote for the Washington Post that she can hardly speak above a whisper at her presentations, so those that still come are hushed and strain to hear her wisdom.

The doctor would later tell prominent newspapers about your reaction, a guttural sound erupting from every hole in your body, but you won’t know about this until you read the article.