Jeannette's Baby

Of course, she had to tell Luke.

That morning she decided to first tell her sister about her positive pregnancy test.

“I can’t have another baby,” Jeannette bit off each word to Bon. The faded graduation photograph of their mother, who they buried just over a year ago, hung on the wall behind her. Baby Chelsea, twenty months old, sat at Jeanette’s feet tethered by a toddler leash, to keep her from escaping. A cup of dry oatmeal cereal and a plastic toy kept her occupied.

Puffy caps were in style for babies that year. Jeannette found a pink one with a brim of ribbon rosettes for Chelsea. As Jeannette leaned over to smooth one of those satin buds, her mother’s heart shaped locket fell forward. She clutched it to her throat instinctively.

Chelsea appeared like a perfect little doll, a baby doll, that’s what she called her. The cap matched her rose pink dress and white ruffle bottom tights and knit booties. She liked to think her mother would approve. Grandma Martha knew the challenges Chelsea faced and encouraged Jeannette to love the baby just as she was.

Bon forced a smile and pushed the plate of store bought molasses cookies toward her. “You and Luke will work this out. It’s still early. This baby won’t come right away.”

“We’re still paying off the hospital bill from the C-section I had with her,” Jeannette gestured toward her babbling child on the floor. “I’ll need another C-section. The infection I got almost killed me. Remember all the drugs I had to take?” Jeannette’s face flushed.

“You had it rough, honey,” Bon conceded, sipping canned hard seltzer and pausing to think. Finally, she blurted,“ Jeannette, I don’t see you going through with an abortion. I don’t think you have it in you, not now that you have Chelsea.”

Jeannette clenched her jaw, her thin lips making a firm line. She imagined her sister would support her more than this.

“ I’ll be there for you, if that’s what you need,” Bon took her hand but her face showed judgement, “but you need to tell Luke, you can’t keep it from him. That wouldn’t be right.”

On the trip back to their small house, Jeannette thought about her limited options as the radio news told about a spill of valproic acid from storage tanks at the Dowel plant on the Chatham River. Spills happened with such frequency they rarely received mention in the news. Jeannette’s father and uncles worked at chemical plants in the region. They used to tell about the dumping of toxic material, mislabeled drums sent to the landfill. They were all gone now, years ago, all with cancer. Treatments failed to slow or stop their tumors' rapid growth.

Chelsea fell asleep in her carseat, her head tipped heavily, craning her neck, her ear rested on her shoulder. She must be uncomfortable. Jeannette didn’t want to move her once they got home for fear that she’d wake. She parked the car in the gravel drive and left the window cracked and the car doors locked while she went inside.

Jeannette didn’t know how other parents managed. She never could move her sleeping daughter and keep her asleep. She had to get the housework done and the baby needed to rest. Chelsea often napped in the car after Jeannette completed errands. Today she cleaned the bathroom, started laundry and sauteed an onion, beginning the night’s dinner before she heard the sound of her toddler’s piercing scream, “Maaa!”

Stepping out the back door, Jeannette smelled the approaching rain through the sulfurous odor of the stacks across the freeway. She saw Chelsea’s red face and heard her yowl again, eyes pinched shut. The toddler couldn’t see her mother coming to save her at that moment.

“I’m here babydoll, Mama’s here.” Jeannette unbuckled the car seat straps and pulled her little one into her arms. Chelsea’s puffy cap slipped off revealing the thirteen blue-purple lesions that covered her nearly hairless head. Jeannette drew in her breath and returned the cap to the baby’s head.

A faded multicolor bow hung on the mailbox next door. The neighbor, Susan Warnecke, had a baby two months ago. Susan got pregnant only a few months after having a miscarriage. Jeannette's cousin Micky had a miscarriage last year in November and another in August this year. Her best friend Riha had four miscarriages in a row before she and Jay gave up. Now Riha didn’t want to chat any more and Jeannette understood. Miscarriages happened all the time. Her mother told her they were not as common in years past.

Jeannette halted her dark thinking and ran with Chelsea back into the house, immediately catching the acrid taint of burning onions. She must have left the stovetop on. She slid the aluminum pan off the burner and started fanning the door to draw out the charred scent. Chelsea tried to wriggle down. “No you don't, my doll baby, stay here with me.”

Chelsea writhed, squealing. Jeannette couldn’t allow her wild toddler to free range while she cooked dinner. “ Maa, Maa” Chelsea begged using her only word. The doctor said he’d refer her to a specialist if she didn’t speak more at two years old. He had said something similar about her crawling. Luke thought she should have been walking by a year but still she slither crawled. “Let’s give her time,” the doctor said without making eye contact.

Jeannette held her firmly, carrying her resistant weight to the playpen in the next room. As she plopped her in, none too gently, Chelsea erupted in tears. Jeannette turned away,“Here’s your show,” Her daughter’s eyes fixed on the flash of the television.

Jeannette’s mother called it the “idiot box.” Mom would have corrected me for leaving Chelsea in front of the TV so much. I’m not one tenth the mother Mom was. What kind of mother wishes for a miscarriage?

She returned to the kitchen, put the blackened pan to soak and chopped another misshapen yellow onion, tears running down her face.

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Laboring with Chelsea, Jeanette believed the contractions would split her in two. The scheduled pitocin drip induction created waves of level ten contractions. Eventually, when the obstetrician announced that the baby needed an emergency surgical delivery, Jeannette breathed through the anesthesia mask rejoicing as it carried her away from the pain. In her final second of consciousness she hoped her baby would be alright.

When she woke, what felt like days later, she glimpsed a swaddled bundle laying in the isolette beside her hospital bed. Luke stood vigil and saw her eyes flutter. He leaned over to kiss her forehead,

“Hi Jeanette, we’ve got our baby. I told them we’re calling her Chelsea, just like we planned.”

She croaked, “Ok, sounds good.”

After the haze of drugs had cleared, she looked at Chelsea for the first time and smiled seeing how much she resembled her mother. A nurse cleared her throat to get Jeannette’s attention and tried to prepare her for her baby’s “witch's teeth”.

“Yes, it is unusual, but not unheard of, for babies to be born with teeth. Chelsea has 18 and they are quite sharp. We advise that you have them capped if you plan to breastfeed,” the nurse gulped, dropped a dentist’s card and a breastfeeding pamphlet on her bed and rushed out of the room.

Their baby’s prenatal teeth were grayish, triangular and keen. Caps seemed like a good solution. With capped teeth Chelsea had even more of a babydoll look. It surprised Jeannette and Luke to meet several other parents of newborns with teeth in the dentist’s waiting room. They shared phone numbers but strangely, Jeannette never found any of the numbers worked.

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“What do you think about these two purple welts on Chelsea’s scalp? It doesn’t look right to me.” Grandma Martha asked Jeannette when she came to help her give the baby her first bath.

Sandra at the neighborhood mother’s group whispered to Jeannette, “I heard about these purple lumps some babies get in their first year. Usually on their heads but sometimes on their backs and down their legs. No diagnosis. The doctors say they’ll outgrow it, but they don’t.”

“It’s from all the EPA deregulations that happened fifty years ago, it let the chemical companies spill their waste in our drinking water,” she added. The next time Jeannette stopped by Sandra’s house another family lived there. The man that answered the door said Janelle and Sandra had moved out of state.

Chelsea was just shy of six months old when Grandma Martha got her cancer diagnosis.

The family doctor told Jeannette at Chelsea’s checkup that the purple “discoloration” was common in infancy and nothing to worry about.

“Yeah, the doctors are whitewashing something, we’re not getting the full story.” Luke took his anger inside himself, drank more and grew quieter. The “don’t worry” message that flooded him at work and in the media asked too much. Something was obviously wrong.

Jeannette's mother died two weeks later. Her ovaries had split open with clusters like frogs’ eggs of impossible postmenopausal ovum that poured into her abdomen and spread throughout her body. Oncologists offered no explanations to the hundreds of women like Martha who developed this novel, aberrant cancer. Total hysterectomy was available for women not planning to conceive. Jeannette and Luke thought they wanted more children. Now she wondered what she had risked.

She remembered that curious biological fact she learned in middle school. When a female embryo is in her mother’s womb her immature ovaries contain the ovum that when fertilized becomes her children. Three generations are contained in one. Were they all destined to these new cancers before they were a sparkle in their grandmother’s eye?

“Those bonnets, that’s a good idea, she looks cute in them.” Luke told Jeannette one night sitting beside her on the couch after dinner. His boozy breath and heavy lids meant he’d be asleep soon.

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Jeannette prepared herself to tell Luke about the pregnancy that night. Now that Bon knew, it might slip out, she couldn’t expect her sister to hold onto news like that. She would wait until after dinner but before he had his third beer so he wouldn’t be too gone.

“Maaa,” Chelsea cried from the playpen, pulling at her ear, “Maaaa.” Jeannette grabbed her up and balanced the baby on her hip while she finished making dinner. Chelsea flopped onto Jeannette’s shoulder and clung heavily, sucking her thumb.

“Hey Jeannie,” Luke stomped in the door dripping gray water on the linoleum. “Dinner smells good.” Jeannette kissed him and shook her head as he passed through the kitchen dropping his lunchbox and jacket carelessly.

Luke returned to the kitchen, “Chelsea, why are you hanging on your Mama like that?” He tickled her ribs, she moaned and pulled tighter to her mother. “Hey, come here and say hi to Daddy.” Chelsea ignored her father’s outstretched arms.

“Yeah, this is new, she didn’t want to sit and watch her show from the playpen so I held her while I made supper. I think she has a fever.”

Luke touched her cheek and it felt hot. He unbuttoned the tiny pearly buttons on the back of her little dress and opened it to let the air touch her skin. Jeannette and Luke saw the deep grape splotches on her neck and upper back.

“Now they’re here,” Luke shook his head in disbelief.

“Oh god,” Jeannette began to cry, “ Not more, not today.”

“What do you mean, not today? What’s today?” Luke pressed her.

“ Luke, I just found out… I didn’t want to tell you this way but… I’m pregnant.”

“Okay… okay,”Luke held Jeannette and Chelsea in his arms. Both crying in hopelessness and dread.

“Maybe you’ll have a miscarriage.”