On the day that you, fifteen, tell your mother you are sorry for saying words that hurt her, you will stand on the bottom tread but one of the hush-carpeted stairs that run through the middle of the two-story house. She will stand in the doorway to the blue dining room, which leads to the kitchen from which you’ve called her. She will furrow her brow, tilt her head, and say Thank you for saying that, then look down and wring her hands, or maybe a kitchen towel. Next, not meeting your eyes, she will heft a hurt into the air, heavy under the weight of double negative: This doesn’t mean you’re not still grounded.

We had a plan: if it happened at home, ostensibly in our bathroom toilet, because we were optimists even in the midst of that personal tragedy, I would not try to retrieve the fetus. Our midwife had suggested that we could have a ceremony, but that didn’t feel right for us. We were sad, collectively, often in entirely different ways, but we didn’t feel
particularly in need of a ritual. Instead, I would just flush it, send it away, a subterranean passage between what we had imagined and what was actually happening, the unlikely closure we needed. I am a girl who knows how to stick to a plan. And so I did.

Fear squeezes me into a sieve of silence. My ears defy the tv’s sounds and the Loud Mouth’s babble. The fluorescent lights are too bright. I can see every dirty scuff mark on the yellowing tile. How long do we sit here? My eyes have been on the floor but I glance up to see Loud Mouth’s face tilted in my direction, her tongue and lips flapping. She is talking to me. She is asking a question. Her words stretch like tendrils of flame across the room. They lick my ears, jolting my cochlea into submission.

There’s a phrase I use to utter at parties in my 20s to make people laugh: Chuck Norris touched me inappropriately. Chuck Norris touched me inappropriately, I would say, with a twinkle in my eyes, a raise of my eyebrow, and a seductive grin, begging my friends to ask for more details.