Christie Chapman
Nonfiction
The first time, I thought it was for real because those were the only kinds of stories I’d heard, and although I know it sounds gross, I took the drugstore test I’d peed on to my parents’ house and when they didn’t answer the door I left it on the brick window ledge, my mom was out buying groceries or something, and I called a bit later and said, “Go look outside,” and she saw the results in all-digital-caps and we were both so joyful, we knew it was too early to tell anyone so we kept the secret, my husband and our parents and I, I was looking into special bras and upping my intake of folic acid when something wasn’t going right, a wrong color, I tried to will it otherwise, I went to the doctor, they drew my blood, and I was walking into a training session at work when I got the call, my doctor said I’m so sorry, the number is going down, I Metroed home and walked in woods and saw yellow leaves playing in the tops of tall trees, and the doctor said come back, we need more blood, we need to make sure the number goes all the way down to zero.
The second time, we’d done IVF and it was our first cycle of that pricey drug-and-needle regimen and we were on a plane to Orlando with my family, we’d just landed, and there was a voicemail from the fertility doctor saying congratulations, and we probably should have known it was all too perfect, gliding into Florida at sunset, a week of mouse ears and theme-park rides with my parents and siblings and their spouses, one of them pregnant, our announcement to the others at a fancy seafood restaurant, and it was weird, because I had to keep getting blood draws all week to make sure the number was going up, but not at our fertility clinic back home, we had to drive the rental car to some lab that was part of a chain, so they could send the results to our clinic, and I was walking the grounds of my parents’ time-share resort, in search of Starbucks for a caffeine-free frappuccino, when I got the call and sat on a bench and they told me, and I had to tell my husband, I went back to our hotel room and saw his back out on the balcony through the glass, reading, his feet up, happy, I had to tell him, it happened again, it didn’t happen again.
The last time, I didn’t trust it, or didn’t want to, or did want to, but I was scared, and we kept hitting milestones, heard a heart beat, saw a bean dance, were given ultrasound printouts, pictures for the fridge, for Facebook, for proud grandparents, I got sick but we kept hitting milestones, I had a mystery illness—maybe hepatitis A food poisoning, maybe Lyme disease, we were never really sure—I got a bad cold and broke ribs from coughing, the high-risk OB/GYN said my cervix was at risk of opening early, they prescribed bedrest like I was some Victorian sickling on a fainting couch, but we kept hitting milestones, “your baby is now the size of a ___,” we painted a nursery, I bought a coming-home outfit, a little pink dress, we installed the car seat, we announced a name, we kept hitting milestones, then came a birth, then came a baby home with us in the car seat, and we keep hitting milestones, but the ones who came before, the ones who just missed, keep waving in those yellow leaves, keep waving in those yellow leaves . . .
Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, VA. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in Electric Literature, LEON: Literary Review, The Bulb Region, Ghost Parachute, Flash the Court, Does It Have Pockets, ARTWIFE, and elsewhere. She was a Lascaux Prize Finalist for Flash Fiction, and was nominated for the Best Microfiction anthology.
