The first available appointment was on what would have been my wedding anniversary. An inauspicious start. Oh. Um. Would it be possible to schedule something a day or two later?

Now, the laugh track from the TV ricochets throughout the crowded patient waiting room, sharp and hollow, like chewing on tinfoil. I shift in my seat, crossing and uncrossing my legs.

My boyfriend Hermann waits in the reception area where I left him an hour ago, just beyond the locked door and metal detector that required us to be buzzed in by a staff member. Co-conspirators, he and I. Partners in crime.

“Amy?” a woman calls, glancing down at the clipboard in her hand.

I sling my purse over my shoulder and follow her toward the private exam rooms.

********

         My bra pinches too tight. I hook my thumb underneath the wire and tug it away from my breast, wriggling my rib cage and adjusting my tank top along with it. An inkblot of perspiration seeps through the fabric; despite the rattling of the air conditioner above my head, trails of sweat pool between my breasts and at the top of my abdomen.

I settle into a cracked vinyl chair next to a nurse who has quietly closed the exam room door behind her. She types at a computer, asking me questions: date of birth, current form of birth control, brief medical history. I am transfixed by the pattern of kittens on the shirt of her scrubs; they are finding endless ways to cause mischief as they leap and paw their way across her thick midriff.

“Six weeks and six days.”

“I’m sorry?” The kittens stop tossing a ball of blue yarn between them.

“Amy, you are six weeks and six days along. Would you like to see the image from the scan?”

Six weeks. Almost seven.  

My fingertips flatten against the dark blue denim beneath them. My hands are funhouse hands, larger than they should be. Misshapen.

“No,” I whisper to the brown kitten with the black stripes. “No. I don’t want to see the image.”

********

A swath of sunshine blanches the grey tiles of the kitchen floor. I’ve swallowed the antibiotics and the two pills that induce abortion. I have opted for a medical abortion instead of a surgical one simply because it was the least expensive option.

My eyes scan the apartments across the quiet avenue. In a window to the lower right, a bright color-blocked rug catches my attention: red squares and yellow rectangles are flanked by zebra-patterned blue and green stripes. The wooden highchair on the edge of the rug is empty.

Thirty-four days have passed since I moved to New York and into Hermann’s apartment. The job I was promised has evaporated and now, for thirteen dollars an hour and no benefits, I work part time answering phones in Manhattan’s hottest restaurant. The fluctuating contents of Hermann’s yellow ceramic piggy bank fill in the gaps of my scant paychecks. Fistfuls of currency, counted out in exacting measure when he leaves for work, pay for what I cannot afford that week: a Metrocard refill, a bottle of Excedrin, some yogurt. Conversations with people I meet through Hermann and at work are desultory, leaving me homesick for the deep connections I knew before. I spin aimlessly, my days a blur of misdirection.

I push the window screen, feeling its gentle resistance against my fingertips. A month and a half pregnant. The screen bows outward. The fucking irony.

Two years prior to moving to New York, my marriage imploded. Even in my early thirties, I couldn’t force myself to want children. I kept waiting for the longing to kick in, but found only a paralyzing certainty that I would lose myself to motherhood, its writ demanding my needs and dreams be forsaken for the happiness of my child. I would live in fear of fading away, my self growing ever dimmer or worse: of not recognizing my own disappearance. That dread lay heavy as a waterlogged wool blanket that I couldn’t maneuver out from under.

My pulse would race when people would ask me when my husband and I would start a family. My responses were either too happy and nervous: Oh, haha! We’re kind of on the five year plan, I guess! Or too defensive: Why would I want to partake in some patriarchal paradigm where I’m the go-to parent? When my mother-in-law told me her son would leave me if I didn’t give him children, I had no response at all.

I floated above my own body, watching someone I barely knew scramble for an explanation that would mollify those who demanded one. I wanted to hug that woman below me. I wanted to shake her. I wanted her to stop trying to make it okay for everyone else in her life that she did not want to have children.

Of course, the one person I couldn’t make it okay for was my husband. While I had been waiting for that elusive desire to kick in, he had been counting our married years and listening to my evasive responses. His inquiries, once patient and delicate, became blunt and probing: How much longer are we going to avoid this conversation, Amy? You want to see the world, but all I want is to stay still and start a family with you. And finally, insistent: I want an answer in the next couple of months.

My answers were not the right ones for the questions he was asking. I couldn’t force myself to want children any more than he could force himself not to.

And now, this. Pregnant. I revisit, for the thousandth time this week, how this could have happened. I have never missed a pill since I’ve been with Hermann.

The screen bounces inward. I brush my hand across my left breast, feeling the unfamiliar weight of it in my palm.

********

The black and white checkered floor of our bathroom is cool against my skin as I lie curled on my side. It buckles and blurs, a mound of it coming up to meet me, then sinks back down flat again. I draw my legs up toward my chest, but that is not comfortable either. I will my body to be still, but my limbs convulse and shake so that my teeth clack against each other. Sweat soaks through multiple layers of clothing from the heat of what must be the beginning of the end.

The pamphlet sits on the floor next to me, rumpled from my sweaty palms. Fever for up to four hours. Intense cramping. Vomiting. Diarrhea. I am unsure if I am hallucinating the string of words that float before me on a loop: You may see your pregnancy expelled. Something about it being a quarter of an inch long. Please, let this end soon.

Again, I am yanked outward by the convulsive spasms of my limbs, abdomen, and jaw. My tongue thickens with a rush of watery saliva. I pull my knees up to my chest again, half rolling over on them so I am almost kneeling. The black tiles rush toward me while the white ones fade to a pinpoint at the end of a long tunnel. When I come to, my head lolls on the cool porcelain of the toilet seat. I open my mouth just wide enough to let the bile dribble out. It meets the water below with a flat thwep.

Hermann is in the doorway now, asking if he can do anything. This man, who befriended me as I mourned the failure of my marriage; in the thick, paralyzing grief that followed he once drove three hours in the middle of the night, battling a howling thunderstorm, just to check on me. I was worried when you said you hadn’t been out of bed in a few days. Hermann: My dear friend and for several months before I even moved to New York, my lover, who opened his home to me somewhere in the space of that transition. It’s a chance to get on your feet while you start over in New York. Just until you get your bearings. And then, Stay as long as you want to, Ames. I love having you here. He has borne the news that I am pregnant with his baby with quiet reassurance; he has ridden with me to and from Planned Parenthood. He has held me and kissed me, whispering his support for my decision to terminate this pregnancy. There is nothing left for him to do.

He starts in toward me but stops when I let out a low moan. “I need a cold cloth on my head,” I whisper. He runs the water and wrings out the washcloth. It is soft, and white, and so clean I want to suck the moisture out of it to cool my tongue. He presses the washcloth to my forehead. I want him to hold me but I do not want to ask. He stares at me, his eyes round and unblinking. He tries to rub my back. “No,” I say. “Please leave me alone.”

The bottoms of his black slippers flick against his heels as he walks away.

********

When I regain consciousness, I whisper his name. “Hermann?” He can’t possibly hear me. I’m almost hoping he won’t so I can disappear into the checkered floor. But he appears and leans over me. “Can you help me to the couch?” His arms slide around me, warm against my drenched clothing. He lifts me up. Cradles me. I breathe in his scent. It is warm cedar and natural soap and skin and it smells like everything different from destruction.

He places me on the soft couch cushion and wraps blankets around me to quell the shaking. He sweeps my bangs, which are soaked with sweat, away from my forehead. “Ames,” he whispers. “What can I do?” The whites of his eyes offset the dark brown irises which dart back and forth, trying to connect with mine. Something other than… just... not this. I ask for Monty Python. He leans in and presses his soft lips against my slick forehead. I rest my head against the back of the couch, drifting in and out of consciousness. I hear a clipped accent and recognize the voice of John Cleese. Hermann sits next to me, his hand resting gently on my knee. He watches me.

********

A year and eight months after my abortion, I’m on the phone with an astrologer who has come highly recommended by a number of my friends.

Despite Hermann’s encouragement, I am flailing in New York: Though I now have a full-time job, the bruising cost of living in Manhattan overwhelms me. I lose entire days to crying silently on the couch. Hermann has started working the word depression into more of our conversations, but without health insurance, I remain curled on my side, praying for sleep to arrive and make time vanish. I drift through my days, directionless.

For a price, this astrologer is meant to be my weathervane.

His voice comes through the phone and I listen, rapt, as he talks about how my life has unfolded and the karmic dues I have paid until this point. He assures me things are turning around. By the second half of the year, I will feel a sizable shift in the right direction. Finances will improve, he promises. Success is imminent. It seems insurmountable to wait that long. And then, “Do you want children, Amy?” he asks quietly.

“What? No. No, I don’t.”

“Ok. Good. I’m only asking because your chart doesn’t show you having children. You have very strong mother energy—very nurturing. But I don’t see children in your chart.”

I transcribe his words into the notebook in my lap, recording proof that the Universe has conspired in my favor. The slow cadence of his speech lulls me into breathing deeply and I confide in him, this astrologer I cannot see, about the abortion that I had over a year and a half ago. It is not something I have shared with those closest to me yet, my visceral certainty to terminate my pregnancy. How would I tell my friends who struggled with infertility? How would I explain that I never once wavered in saving who I was in danger of losing?

But as my voice trips over the secret spilling from my mouth, I know: I don’t need an astrologer. I was—I am—my own weathervane.