grabbed her arms, turned both of their bodies, and hurled her down the stairs like a sack off a bridge. She thumped heavily, her fluttering arms reaching, without success, for the banister. Her face contorted into a soundless scream. When there was the final thud that denoted the falling was done, she lay sprawled there, hands on her stomach. My father looked down from the top of the stairs, toppled down, stepped over her, and walked out of the door.
Later, after Carl and the money were gone, while Momma made another bottle of water for Champ, she vomited. She was too late in her pregnancy for morning sickness and there was nothing to expel anyway. Still, her stomach turned into a blender, crunching her insides. She went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, waited for something to come out. Then there was a plop, but the expected feeling of release and relief did not follow. Then another and another. Then just red drops diving past water’s surface. She gripped the side of the toilet with both hands. If it hadn’t been porcelain, the seat would have molded to her grip. Another jolt, one that made her stand as if her body were called to attention. Blood ran down Momma’s legs like rivers to a red ocean. Her brown thighs were the canvas, and the blood, in lines and clumps, sketched patches of life along her skin.
Momma later woke in the hospital. She sat in the bed, pressing her belly, trying to see if any parts of my sister were still there. Blood pouring from her body, the call for help, the ride to the hospital, the news her baby had died were all clear memories that could not belong to her. She imagined them suspended in air, waiting to be picked up by someone else. She pressed her flat belly. It had never been large and round like most mothers’. It had always had that not pregnant, just full look, so “she” could still be there, hiding, waiting to see if it was safe to come out.
People passed Momma’s door, but no one came in. Her thoughts went to Champ as she wondered whether he had something to eat. Worry turned to guilt as a nurse brought her a tray of food: Jell-O, green beans, chicken and rice, grape drink with foil covering, and milk. Momma looked at the food, breathed in its aroma. She could taste each morsel through her nose. That meal cost more than the two dollars Carl took and it alone could have fed them for days if she managed it right.
At home, she would have cut the chicken breast into little pieces, added water, flour, and made gravy. This she would have separated into fours. Chicken gravy on rice one day, chicken on bread the second, chicken soup the third day, and broth the fourth. She would have mixed most of the rice in the concoction with just a little salt and sliced the green beans into oval pieces, which would give the allusion of more. She’d have added water to the juice until it was lavender and sipped it for breakfast and lunch as she imagined the taste of the chicken strands against her tongue for dinner. She would have cut the Jell-O into cubed pieces and put them in the freezer so she could suck the cubes if she had a sugar or soda craving. The milk she would have saved just for Champ. She would have diluted it of course, but left it thick enough for the top of his tongue to turn white with the sucking, so he would know what real, not evaporated or powdered, but real milk tasted like. She could have done so much with so little, as she had always done.
Weeks into my stay, the doctors released me. I wasn’t the baby Momma brought into the hospital. Rolls of fat gathered under my neck, in the creases of my arms, and hugged disposable pampers, which replaced Momma’s hand-washed ones. I had cut two new teeth, those which Momma discovered as I bit down when she tried to extract a clump of bread I’d stuffed in my mouth. I was walking then, teetering across the hospital room, pulling at oxygen lines hanging from the wall. The nurses, with pride, had shown Momma I had learned to walk as one held my arms over my head and the other stood at the end of the hall beckoning me to her. Momma said she cried when she saw this. I’ve always wondered why.
The plastic tent was gone. The needles, too, were gone and the only indication I’d been sick was a dried patch of mucus sitting atop my lip. Momma said I was a favored baby on the floor. The nurses all bragged I never fussed, that I always ate well, and smiled the brightest when they entered my room. It wasn’t unusual for Momma to visit and find me draped on the hip of one of the nurses at the nursing station. This made Momma proud. Good babies came from good mommas, and according to the nurses I was as good as they get.
After my discharge, all of the nurses gathered to say goodbye. They kissed my cheeks, held me one last time, and showed Momma again how well I could walk. One of the nurses planted me on the floor. Momma held out her pinky finger. I teetered forward, then backward. I reached for one of the nurses and then for Momma. Seeing me walk and laugh made her happy I was well, but many milestones separated me from her. I looked to the nurses for food. I looked to them for comfort after only a few weeks. The only times she was allowed to be my sole caretaker were the early morning feedings, which she never missed. Every day, she was there to spoon me my first meal. She even took a spoon for herself when the nurses weren’t looking. Every day she visited that hospital, rubbed my back, fed me my food. Still tired, still worried about Champ back home, there was happiness in seeing me grow strong. Strength was what I needed. She, alone, knew what we had to go back to.
Momma carried me as we exited the hospital. Her back began to hurt so she put me on the floor. Since I was walking, she’d brought “new to me” shoes from the Goodwill. They were heavy roach stompers with a few scrapes on the front, but I pranced in them as if they’d just come out of Bradlees. I was small for my age and the chubby parts looked foreign on my body. I teetered forward fast, periodically looking back at Momma, waiting for instruction, but she just smiled, waiting to see how far I would go without her. Nurses and patients stopped and smiled as I walked down the corridor. Momma, still behind, walked slowly, keeping her eyes trained on my movements, ready to dart if I appeared to be losing ground.
There was more snow that morning than Momma had seen in her whole life. The flakes, as large as rocks, were falling hard enough to crackle against the snowdrifts. Momma felt ice pangs in her hip, and the muscles in her back were taut like a timing belt. She trudged, one baby on her hip, one at her side, one in her belly. Her eyes were squinted so tightly, she could barely see my father walking toward us. He, too, was bent, face turned to the ground, snowflakes jamming around his head, wrapped in a skullcap. But for his strut, off balance, vacillating side to side like he was walking in two directions at the same time, Momma wouldn’t have recognized him.
She smiled when she saw him, even though the last time they’d spoken they had argued about the other woman, the one she had stabbed him over when she caught her in our house. But none of that mattered on that snowy morning because I was dead weight, and Champ, only two, was tripping on every bump in the snow, and Dathan, the baby inside, was kickboxing her bladder, her ribs. Momma worried that he too was cold.
Carl walking right at Momma saw her, but didn’t see her. When he realized it was his wife and children emerging through the fog of snow, he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Momma did not stop. She walked faster, harder, pulling Champ so quickly he left drag marks in the snow. She stood face to face with my father. She didn’t ask where he had been or why he hadn’t come home for days. She just pushed me into his arms and wrapped the blanket tightly around my face. He looked into her eyes, the same eyes he’d promised forever and said, “Lois, take this girl. I’m not going home with you.”
Momma’s eyes widened, as if they would help her hear better. My father’s mouth was moving, but Momma refused to hear. She focused on the warm breath escaping his mouth, clouding around his face, and the clumps of snow cutting through the haze. The sides of her chapped lips split even as she thought of forming words. But her eyes, like her daddy’s, spoke sentences without words. “Help me get these kids out of the snow, then you can go where you want. You know Laurie just got out of the hospital. Do not leave us now.” This, her eyes said.
Carl’s eyes were not as vocal, so he shook his head, and rolled his eyes
