Fern woke up back in the same bed, the same stack of paper towel boxes in the corner, staring up at the same acoustic tiles. For a second she wondered if anything had even happened. Then she put her hand on Charlie Brown like she’d done a hundred times before and it kept going until it hit slack skin. Her baby was gone.
Panic fluttered through her body. Was Charlie Brown alive? Did he die? Was he all right? She remembered the mask going down over her face, then nothing. She tried to sit up, but all her muscles had come unstrung. Hurt filtered in from every corner of her body.
A young nurse with a big brunette bubble of hair came in. She took Fern’s wrist and checked her pulse against her watch.
“Any pain?” she chirped.
“My baby,” Fern gasped, pulling her wrist out of the nurse’s grip, trying to drag herself into a sitting position. “Where’s my baby?”
“In the nursery,” the nurse said, recapturing her wrist.
Relief flooded Fern. Charlie Brown was alive. Her baby was alive.
“I want to see him.”
“You need to rest,” the nurse said.
She dropped Fern’s wrist, wrote something on her chart, and walked out the door. Fern tried to call her, but all she managed was a raspy wheeze. She needed to see Charlie Brown. It filled her like hunger. All she could do was rattle the metal rail on her bed, so she threw her entire battered body into the effort. Finally, the nurse came back in the room.
“What’s all this commotion?” she asked.
“I want to see my baby,” Fern said, then added, “Please.”
“Let me get you a bedpan,” the nurse said, as if she’d misunderstood.
At the mention of her bladder Fern became aware it was so full it might burst. She did an inventory of her body. It was the wrong weight and the wrong shape. The inside of her right arm ached with bruises. She was starving.
The nurse held the bedpan under her, and it took a minute for Fern to figure out how to make her muscles work and then she went to the bathroom. Hot, salty knives sliced papercuts between her legs and she let out a gasp. Tears leaked down her face.
“That’s how it’ll be for a while,” the nurse said, not unkindly. “We’ll bring you a sitz.”
The nurse took the bedpan away and came back with a bowl of grits. Fern didn’t want them but they were the richest, butteriest, best thing she’d ever tasted. When she finished, her mind went back to her baby. She’d forgotten to ask about him this time, and then her mind went to something else and her hand flew to her neck: the pouch.
She leaned over, razors slicing her stomach, but it wasn’t on the floor. As she pushed herself over to check the other side of her bed, the door opened and Diane came in.
“I heard it all went great,” she said. “Congratulations!”
“I want to see my baby,” Fern said.
“Right now,” Diane said, “there is a wonderful, loving couple on their way to this hospital to start their new family, and you can be sure they’re going to love that child more than you ever thought possible.”
“I need to see him,” Fern said.
“Let me get you some water,” Diane said.
She poured a glass of water and held it out.
“Where’s my baby?” Fern asked.
“The baby is fine,” Diane said. “Drink this. You need to get your strength back.”
Fern took the glass in her shaking hand and forced some down.
“The baby is healthy, it’s responsive, it has all its extremities, but you shouldn’t see it.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Fern asked.
“It’ll make surrender harder,” Diane said.
“No,” Fern tried to explain. “I haven’t changed my mind. I just need to see him. I only want to hold him, not even for five minutes.” She was begging now. “I’ll give him right back but I need to see him just this one time.”
Diane braced her hands on the rail beside Fern’s bed and looked at her. She seemed sad.
“Fern,” she said. “You’re not the first girl to feel this way, so trust me when I say that once you see the baby, it’ll be too late. Five minutes will become ten, ten will become an hour, an hour will turn into a day, and you won’t want to give it back. I know this is hard. This is the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do, but you need to be an adult right now and think of what’s best for the baby.”
“My baby!” Fern said. “Not the baby! My baby! My baby!”
Sweat prickled her skin. The sheets felt hot, trapping her in a bed she didn’t want to be in; she needed to be with her baby.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” she promised. “I’m not. But I need to see him, Diane. Please.”
Diane stared at Fern for a minute, then closed her eyes.
“All right,” she said. “Okay. I’ll have the nurse bring it in, but I want you to know this is a big mistake.”
“No, it’s not,” Fern babbled. “I promise. I promise it’s not a mistake. I just want to hold him.”
Diane left and the nurse came back and sponge-washed Fern. She changed the sheets and brought her a fresh gown. She fed her a bowl of chicken and rice soup and took her to the bathroom where she sat on the toilet and it hurt almost worse than having her baby.
Fern brushed her hair, and the nurse sat her up in bed, and then the contractions hit.
Fern gasped, doubling over. This was supposed to be done. Something was wrong.
“I know,” the nurse said. “Those afterpains really do a number on you.”
The cramps felt like they’d go on forever, but after an eternity Fern realized that either she was getting used to them or they were easing up. Finally, her stomach just felt bruised.
Diane stood in the doorway.
“This is your last chance,” she said. “You don’t have to do this to yourself.”
“Where is he?” Fern asked. “Is he here?”
Diane said something to someone in the hall and a different nurse came into Fern’s room pushing a gray warming box to the side of the bed. Inside was the softest pink blanket and underneath it was the smooth, serious face of Fern’s son. She recognized him right away. She’d seen his face a hundred times in photographs; she’d seen it a million times in the mirror. He looked like her.
“Can I hold him?” Fern breathed.
“Her,” the nurse said, lifting Fern’s daughter from the warming box. “You had a little girl.”
Fern’s mind rearranged itself and she almost cried. She had a daughter. The nurse settled her baby’s fragile, weightless weight against Fern’s chest, and the bruises on her arm, the pain between her legs, nothing compared to how this felt. She looked sleepy and perfect snuggled against her, and Fern wished she’d open her eyes and see her mother, and it was like her baby heard because she opened her eyes and they were the most beautiful brown Fern had ever seen and she realized she’d made them, inside her body; she had grown her daughter’s eyes.
Fern laid one finger against her little girl’s perfectly formed fingers with their microscopic wrinkled knuckles, and they flexed open and closed around her finger, gripping tighter than she expected.
“Diane,” Fern said, not taking her eyes off her daughter. “Are the papers permanent? What happens if I change my mind?”
She didn’t have to look up to feel Diane’s back stiffen. But every inch of her daughter was alive. Every inch of her was a miracle. Every inch of her was Fern.
“We went through this together. You’ve made the best decision,” Diane said. “You’re confused right now from the gas. You’re excited to see the baby. This isn’t the time to change your mind.”
“But what if?” Fern said. “What if I didn’t make the best decision? What if this is the best decision?”
Fern looked at her daughter’s face, slipping into sleep. How could she never see her again?
“The nurse needs to take her back and feed her,” Diane said, and Fern tensed. “You’ll be able to hold her again after.”
Letting them take her baby out of her arms was the hardest thing Fern had ever done. The young nurse put her back in the box and rolled her out the door like a tiny queen and Fern watched the door long after they’d gone, feeling the echo of her daughter on her body. The room felt too empty now. All she wanted was to see her baby again.
“Can I get the papers back?” Fern asked.
Diane set her mouth in a hard line, but she spoke as softly as she could.
“If that’s what you want,” she said, “I’ll stand right here and tear them up with you. But is that your sensible self talking? Or your emotional self?”
“She’s my daughter,” Fern said. “I’m her mother. Mothers don’t give away their children.”
Diane took a folding chair from against the wall and opened it. She sat so she was at eye level.
“It’s hard,” Diane said. “No doubt about it. But you’re not giving up the baby. You’re giving it an opportunity to live a life full of love.”
“I can give her opportunities,” Fern said. “I can talk to my parents. We’ll find a way.”
“You’re a smart kid,” Diane said. “But you’re still a kid, with no money, no job, no place of your own. You don’t even have a high school diploma. Your parents sent you here to have the baby and put it up for adoption. Do you think they’re going to be thrilled to see you walk back in the door carrying it in your arms? What will people say? Will your friends stick by you?”
Fern saw Hilda and Deb calling less and less until they weren’t calling at all. She saw herself at home, her bedroom turned into a nursery, feeding her daughter alone while everyone ate downstairs in the bright dining room, their voices floating up through the floor.
“But I love her,” Fern said. “I didn’t know I would love her so much.”
“This isn’t a decision between right and wrong,” Diane said. “It’s a decision between bad and worse. You think you want to keep this baby, but doing that means you’re giving up everything: an education, meeting the right guy, being with your friends, having a career, starting a real family.”
Fern knew Diane was right, but it was impossible. Diane couldn’t be right.
“How can I give her away?” Fern asked.
“You shouldn’t have to make this decision,” Diane said, and for the first time, Fern felt she was speaking to her as an equal. “That’s your baby, Fern. You love her but if you keep her you will lose out on so much. People will turn their backs on you. Your baby will grow up with less. You will destroy your life and the baby’s life, and not because you did anything wrong but because you chose to be its mother and that’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Or you can harden your heart and give the baby to a loving couple who will provide it with everything you can’t and then go live your life. Go live your life and act like this never happened. I wish there was a better way, Fern, with everything in my heart, but this is the world we live in. It’s not perfect, but it’s the only world we’ve got.”
It was too big. Fern couldn’t wrap her mind around this. It barely fit inside her head. A heaviness pressed down on her body.
“Tomorrow?” she asked. “Can I make up my mind tomorrow? Please? I just want to see her again tonight, and I promise I’ll make up my mind tomorrow, but not now. I can’t right now.”
Diane rested her elbows on her knees and clasped her hands, looking at the floor, then she pushed herself up.
“If you decide to keep the baby,” Diane said, folding her chair and leaning it back against the wall, “you’ll need to pay your hospital bill. You came in here Wednesday night, Thursday morning, really. That’s going to be two days you’ll owe. Three by the time you go home with the baby, most likely. You’ll need to pay the delivery costs, bed costs, and you’ll need to pay the bill for the Home.”
Fern didn’t understand what she was saying. Diane had switched topics from the baby to something she didn’t understand.
“You never told me this,” she said.
“Because as long as you were giving the baby up for adoption, all those fees were covered,” Diane said. “But if you’re keeping the baby, those bills have to get paid.”
“But I worked at the Home,” Fern said.
“Which covers your room and board,” Diane said. “But there’re clinic fees, my fees, clerical fees, processing charges. I don’t mean to drop this on you, but if you want to keep the baby, then that’s a real choice that has real consequences.”
“How much?” Fern asked.
“Off the top of my head,” Diane said, “around two thousand dollars.”
Fern couldn’t breathe. It was as much as their station wagon. She’d never be able to get that kind of money.
Diane straightened up.
“I’ll check back in the morning,” she said. “Look, maybe you’re lost in some neurotic fantasy and you don’t care what you’re doing to that couple coming here, thinking they’re about to start a family, but I’m begging you, don’t do this, Fern. Don’t do this to them. Don’t do this to yourself.”
A lump moved up Fern’s throat, making it hard to swallow.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she said quietly. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
The nurse brought Charlie Brown to see Fern three more times that night. Fern decided that even though Jasmine’s boy/girl necklace was clearly broken, she and Charlie had been through too much together to change her name now. Besides, she’d always liked boys’ names for girls.
The first time the nurse brought Charlie, Fern discovered how small and soft her finger- and toenails were. The second time, she saw the ridges and whorls of her fingerprints. No one else in the world had these fingerprints. They were totally and completely unique to her daughter. The third time, Charlie began to cry and Fern couldn’t figure out what had upset her. As Charlie wailed, Fern felt a pinch behind her nipples, like a pressure inside her breasts, and she didn’t know what it was as she desperately bounced Charlie in her arms like she’d seen mothers do, but the baby shrieked louder, on and on, rattling her eardrums.
No matter what Fern did, the baby kept crying until finally the nurse appeared, and the moment she took the baby out of Fern’s arms, it went quiet. The nurse left with her, and Fern lay there with her aching breasts, feeling like a failure.
You have no right being a mother, she thought. You don’t even know what to do.
No one thought she could do this. No one wanted her to do this. She wanted to see her mom. She wanted to see her family, but they wouldn’t want her if she had Charlie Brown. They’d turn their backs. She’d never be their daughter again. She’d never be their sister. She’d be an unwed mother forever. Her beautiful daughter would be a bastard.
They brought Fern’s dinner tray and Fern felt embarrassed at how hungry she was, but she couldn’t help it. She started eating her meat loaf before the nurse even left the room. As the door swung shut, Miss Parcae stepped out from behind it and stood at the foot of Fern’s bed. She wore a pistachio-green skirt and jacket. Fern stopped, fork in midair.
“Yes,” Miss Parcae said. “I see you.”
“I’ll scream,” Fern said as the door clicked shut.
“Whyever would you do that?”
“You tried to hurt me,” Fern said.
Miss Parcae wrinkled her forehead, making a show of searching her memory, tapping her lips with one finger thoughtfully.
“Did I?” she asked. “I don’t remember that. I remember you losing my book. I remember you breaking your vow. I remember you refusing to honor your obligations. But I don’t remember doing anything to you except trying to help.”
“The rocks,” Fern said.
Miss Parcae raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Pishposh. I merely wanted to get your attention. Do I have it now? Because it’s time to make up your mind.”
Everywhere she turned, someone wanted Fern to decide something.
“I don’t want anything to do with you,” Fern said. “I haven’t changed my mind. I just want to take my baby and go home.”
“I can help you with that,” Miss Parcae said. “Come with us and keep the child.”
“I…” Fern said, and for a long moment, she wanted it.
Then she remembered the alien voice in her head, thinking in a language she couldn’t understand.
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
Miss Parcae dug into her purse and pulled out a hankie. She leaned down over Fern, her face looming large. Fern pressed herself back against the pillow.
“I’m running out of patience, dear,” Miss Parcae said through gritted teeth.
Then she dabbed at the corner of Fern’s mouth and stood back up.
“Meat loaf,” she smiled.
Fern noticed that Miss Parcae had lost weight. Her cheeks were hollow and the skin around her neck hung loose. It wasn’t just her eyes that were yellow; her face had an amber tinge to it now, too.
“Do you remember our previous visit?” Miss Parcae asked.
A flash of fur and forests and firelight, a crowd of women laced up and down the necklace of time, all having their babies with her. Alien speech erupting inside her head in an unfamiliar voice.
“Yes,” she said.
Miss Parcae tucked her hankie back into her purse and snapped it shut. Her lipstick was smudged.
“They could have comforted you,” she said. “They could have been with you in your hour of need. Did you want your mother? I’ve heard that one often longs for one’s mother during their crisis.”
“Yes,” Fern said, her voice small.
“She would have been there,” Miss Parcae said. “You would never be lonely again.”
“But it wouldn’t be my mother,” Fern said, trying to make her understand. “I wouldn’t be me.”
Miss Parcae’s face sharpened.
“Of course not,” she snapped. “Are you yourself now, dear? Are you still the bright-eyed daughter of Dale and Lorna? A member of the thespians who’s going to play Helen Keller in the senior theatrical? Are you that same girl you were ten months ago, who cared about homework and Latin and boys? Or are you a woman who has had a baby, who has been betrayed and abandoned? Who has seen the cruel ways of this world? None of us are who we were, not a year ago, not a week ago, not one minute ago. In five years I guarantee you won’t recognize yourself now.”
“But I’ll still be me!” Fern said.
“Not to them!” Miss Parcae snapped. “Daughter, student, whore—they change you into whatever they need you to be. Choose for yourself. For once in your life!”
Fern got a whiff of something grimy beneath Miss Parcae’s scent of lavender water.
“I am offering you something beyond the ordinary humdrum grind waiting to destroy you,” Miss Parcae said. “The after-school job in an ice cream parlor, two years at some junior college, an MRS degree, a lifetime on your knees scrubbing toilets and floors for a man. I am offering you transcendence!”
“What about Mags?” Fern asked.
Miss Parcae gave a snort and looked at the paper towels stacked in the corner.
“Mags betrayed herself,” she told them. “She didn’t know her own mind. The line of the Sibyl goes back four thousand years, but she fell in ‘love.’ He told her pretty lies and filled her head with fairy tales. She refused to honor her vow and time was short. We had no choice.”
She turned to Fern, eyes wide.
“Four thousand years,” she said. “Can you imagine? An unbroken line back to a time when actual goddesses walked the hills. We couldn’t lose that, Fern, and so we summoned the Triple-Faced Goddess, and she preserved the line inside Mags. The line remains unbroken, but Mags, unfortunately, does not. When the time comes, the line can be passed intact to a more willing vessel. Mags made her choice. But it doesn’t have to be like that for you. It wasn’t for me. Or Dolores.”
But Fern saw Mags, sitting in the firelight, gumming words at the voices inside her head. She thought about four thousand years. She thought about her daughter. It was too much.
“I didn’t ask for this,” Fern said.
“Transcendence doesn’t need to be voluntary,” Miss Parcae said. “I have carried this flame my entire life, and you are the one to carry it now. Two thousand years of lives. Once the line of Hecate is broken, all those women are gone forever. No one wrote about them in books or preserved them in song. They will be erased. I will not have that happen because of the indecisiveness of a child.”
“So you’re going to force me?” Fern asked. “Like Mags?”
Miss Parcae didn’t answer, then her chest heaved and suddenly she was coughing into her hand, hard and harsh, coming from deep in her lungs. She snatched a tissue and pressed it to her mouth and Fern saw it blossom red. Finally, Miss Parcae stopped, breathing hard, tucking the stained tissue into her sleeve. She took a moment to compose herself, folding a wisp of hair back into her bun.
“There is another way,” she said, and Fern saw blood in the gaps between Miss Parcae’s teeth.
“What?” Fern asked, feeling a cautious sense of hope.
“Give me the child,” Miss Parcae said. “If we come to a child young enough, it accepts the line. She grows into her burden. We don’t like to do that—a woman who willingly accepts her vows is a better vessel—but it can be done.”
She’d barely stopped speaking when Fern snapped, “Stay away from my daughter!”
Miss Parcae looked surprised.
“Why?” she asked. “You’re giving her to strangers.”
“She’s my daughter!” Fern said, and the unfairness of it all overwhelmed her. “And I am doing what’s best! I’m giving her a home where she’ll be loved and taken care of! I’m just a kid! I’m only fifteen and everyone keeps wanting things from me! I can’t do this! I can’t handle everyone pulling on me again, and again, and again!”
The echoes of her voice died in the corners of the room. She looked down at the sheets, at the smaller mound of her stomach.
“So be it,” Miss Parcae said. “It would be difficult to force you here, and I’d prefer not to force you at all, but I have no time left. I will not have my life—all these lives—come to nothing because of you.”
Fern was sick of these threats.
“The nurse is coming back,” she said. “She’ll see you.”
Miss Parcae looked Fern up and down, then walked to the corner of the room.
“When we come for you,” she said, “you will wish you had chosen. You will wish you had given us your child. We don’t want to break you, Fern. But we will.”
The door swung open and the nurse came in.
“All finished with our meal?” she chirped.
Fern caught a glimpse of Miss Parcae’s green-clad back walking impossibly deeper into the corner, and then she was gone.
Fern found the pouch on the floor just under her bed. It took her a while to hook it with her fingers, and then she retied it and pulled it over her head. The moment she did, a distant roaring in her ears she hadn’t noticed before went quiet. Some connection had been cut. She would wear this pouch forever, if she had to. She wouldn’t let them turn her into Mags. She wouldn’t let them take her daughter.
A different nurse came in and sponged her clean and changed her sheets and helped her to the bathroom and it hurt bad, but she was getting used to it. Like Hazel had said, you could get used to anything. The nurse gave Fern an orange juice, so Fern assumed it was morning.
Eventually, she looked up and saw Diane leaning against the door. Diane searched Fern’s face for clues. Fern looked away into the empty corner of the room.
“What are they like?” she asked.
“Who?”
Fern shrugged. She couldn’t say it. Diane’s energy grew calm.
“They’ve both got good jobs and college degrees,” she said. “I know that much. I haven’t met them, but the agency has a selection process that hasn’t gone wrong yet.”
Fern nodded.
“Okay,” she said.
Diane let it lie between them for a moment.
“Do you want to see the baby again?” she asked. “This might be your last chance.”
Fern closed a door inside herself.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s best if I don’t.”
Diane left to get started on the paperwork.
The baby would go to a loving couple with good jobs and college degrees. The baby wouldn’t go to the witch. The baby wouldn’t go to her. The baby would go away.
Fern got out of bed and stood on the cold floor in her bare feet and shucked off her sweaty gown. She unrolled the top of her paper bag and put on her going-home outfit: a red button-up blouse and a blue denim skirt. Normal clothes, a few sizes too big, but not maternity clothes. Diane came back with a clipboard.
“One last chore,” she said. “Just sign this and I’ll take you home.”
Fern looked down at the form with Certificate of Birth printed across the top. Someone had filled in all the blanks with a typewriter. Her name was Doe, Jane. Her date of birth was January 1, 1952. Her place of birth was United States of America, U.S.A. The space for the baby’s name was blank.
“You can just sign it Jane Doe,” Diane said. “It’s easier that way.”
Fern took the pen and went to sign, then paused.
“Will my daughter ever see this?” she asked.
“It goes to the new parents,” Diane said. “So it’s up to them.”
That was all she needed to know. Fern moved her wrist the way she’d moved it a thousand times over test papers and homework. She signed it N. Craven.
“Fern,” Diane said. “You accidentally put your name. Let me get you a fresh one.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Fern said.
Diane hesitated, then took the clipboard.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
On the way down in the elevator, Fern panicked.
“What if I see them?” she asked. “What if they’re in the lobby with the baby?”
“You’re not going to see them,” Diane said. “I promise.”
But just in case, Fern kept her head down when they got off the elevator and Diane steered her outside to the taxicab and helped her in. She had come to the hospital with Charlie Brown and a paper bag of clothes, and now she was going home with nothing but aching nipples.
“You can look up now,” Diane said.
Fern raised her head. They’d left downtown. She looked out the window at the same houses she’d passed when her dad drove her to the Home three months ago. She looked at all the normal people driving their cars, in their yards, sitting on their front porches, all these normal people who’d never have to make these choices.
She’d had a daughter. She’d learned how to fly.
Now she had neither. Now she had nothing.
She wanted to go home. Go home and see her friends and pretend she had been at drama camp all summer, and pretend she cared what x equaled, and whether they were going to do Life with Father or Arsenic and Old Lace for the senior play, and never, never, never think about the baby or the witches again.
Fern sat in her misshapen, sweaty body, feeling the tight pinch of the stitches between her legs, and she knew that she had failed. She had picked herself over her child, and she knew she would spend the rest of her life punishing herself for that.