Page 18 - WTP Vol. IX #10

Nothing at All (continued from preceding page) neither of them thought about it anymore.
“Oh, that’s what this is. Right. I remember ordering this.” He held up what looked to her like a tiny white- water raft.
“Do you like it?”
“I love it,” she said. “And I love you.” She had no idea what it was.
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Morning sickness kept her up some nights. At least, she thought it was morning sickness. A few times each week, she’d lurch straight up in bed with her heart pounding into every corner of her body and
a warm sick feeling spreading across her skin. She looked it up once while she waited there on the bath- room floor, and the phone confirmed that morning sickness could happen anytime, even at night. Calling it morning sickness was another lie they told.
She didn’t vomit on these nights. Just sat on the bath- room floor with the fan on and looked at her phone until the nausea passed. It took an hour or two, some- times more.
She imagined her friend on the ground beside her, rolling her eyes while they waited it out. “Why don’t you just throw up already? Seriously, you’ll feel much better.”
“I don’t know.”
“This isn’t about the whole grandpa thing, is it?”
When she’d been twelve, her grandfather came over one Easter morning and vomited on himself on the couch. He was embarrassed and left quickly, didn’t even clean himself up first. It was during that in- between time, when he’d lost control of himself but was trying to hide it from everyone. He phoned her mother an hour later to say it had just been a little bug, and again he was sorry for what happened,
and he was really feeling quite fine now, better than fine, even. It wasn’t working, the hiding it. He drove back that afternoon, grandma in tow, although mom thought he maybe shouldn’t be driving anymore, and within a half hour he’d vomited all over the dinner table, on the ham and the corn and the candles, salad, sweet buns, and rolls.
She hadn’t vomited in the twenty years since then, but she actually kind of enjoyed these nights on the bathmat. She liked that she could will the sickness to stay inside her, felt proud to have such control over
every tendon and tiny muscle she couldn’t name.
She used the time for her research. It always started out as one thing but then quickly became another. One night she browsed the recently-viewed items in their shopping account. He’d been looking at alarms for the car that detected if a baby was in the backseat and would go off to remind you not to leave it there when you got out. Scrolling down to the reviews, she filtered them so she’d see the bad ones first. This was how she always did it. The people who disliked the product, it turned out, really, really disliked it, along with anyone who bought it or even thought about buying it.
They said things like: “Do you need a reminder to feed your kids, too? Or change their diaper? Jesus Christ.”
“If you really need a $300 product to tell you not to leave your child locked in a hot car, you shouldn’t have kids.”
Soon, she was reading about women who’d killed their children. Sometimes it was an accident, a sleep- ing infant forgotten in a backseat while the mom
was buying groceries, and sometimes it was very much on purpose, babies suffocated or drowned or dropped on their heads and then quietly discarded in public waste bins. She learned that women were more likely than men to kill their babies, and that most of the time it happened in the first twenty-four hours of the child’s life.
She read in the comments of one story: “There is a special place in hell for this woman. That a woman could kill her own child is the most unnatural sin imaginable. She should have killed herself instead.”
And maybe it was just the time of night, or the hor- mones she’d also been reading about, but she couldn’t help feeling sad for the woman. In her
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