Don’t Forget to Feed the Wall Cats

I walk to the gas station to buy a pregnancy test and lice shampoo. The sidewalks are an ant farm of accumulated ice crystals, and I’m wearing my biggest coat so if I’m pregnant the baby might be warm. It’s a half mile to the gas station, and I grab lice shampoo first. With lice three times pre-college, I know my favorite fine-tooth combs. I walk past the pregnancy tests and pretend to look for Ibuprofen. I walk back and forth in the aisle before growing the balls to square my shoulders to the tests. If only I had balls, I wouldn’t be squatting down to read what tests have a wider tip “so I won’t miss” or if I can read my results in 3 minutes. If I had more than fourteen dollars, maybe I’d splurge on a three pack for extra assurance. A small lady in a mink coat walks past me, stopping at the toothbrushes.

“Just go to the dollar store. Tests are the same,” she says.

“Oh, thanks.” I barely hear my words, so I doubt she does either.

I pray to not see a professor or neighbor or classmate. The warmth in my belly moves to my cheeks, and on the way to the register, I drop the test and treatment. Everyone stares.

The cashier pops her gum. “Would you like a paper bag for this?”

***

It’s positive.

It might be Owen’s, but it also might belong to the librarian I made love to behind the encyclopedias. When he went back to the front desk, I skimmed through the L encyclopedia and learned about labyrinths, lemon trees, the Loch Ness monster, and lungfish; I wish I had looked for lice. The sperm could also belong to the Uber driver who drove me to his place— a bachelor pad with brick walls. Even though I have an IUD, I shouldn’t have let them finish inside of me. Boys never ask, but I usually don’t mind because the warmth is the most intimate part.

The muscle memory of Owen’s number comes in handy, but I hang up before the first ring and start a bath instead. Naked in front of the mirror, my nipples are bigger than usual—and darker. They are unrecognizable to me. Would Owen have noticed? Maybe he would’ve realized I was pregnant before it occurred to me. If we were still together, he would have known something was off by the way I had rearranged the furniture daily for the past two weeks. Then again, if we were together, maybe I wouldn’t have bought that new couch that smells like asphalt. Even though I don’t have a place for it, I can’t get rid of it because it was free and velvet and orange.

In the bath, a few pieces of hair float away from the drain and stick to the sides. I poke my stomach. I thought the nausea and mood swings were from the combination of my break-up and the sixty frozen burritos I’d consumed this month. The last time Owen and I had sex was in the Cracker Barrel parking lot, and it could have been hot breakup sex if we weren’t crying, if his car radio wasn’t broken, and if we had something to say on the fifteen-minute drive back to my house. No matter who the father is, my baby will not have a beautiful conception story.

“I’m home,” My sister says from the front hall, “and ready to murder some bugs.”

“I’m in the bath,” I say as I pull the shower curtain closed so she can come in. Being in a tub of water felt strange when in a dark, enclosed space. I feel like when I’m surrounded by walls, the water will keep rising until I’m consumed by my own amniotic sac. Also, our shower curtain has all the president’s butts on them—all 45. I don’t want to look at 45 dude butts while I’m bathing, but the shower curtain is Piper’s, and we agreed she could put the shower curtain up if I could hang my reproduction of Picasso’s “Blue Nude.” She thought it was depressing for a living room. I thought Trump’s ass was depressing.

***

While Piper combs through my hair, she asks if the baby is Owen’s.

“I hope so,” I say.

She opens a bottle of Two Hearted. “Have you told mom? She’s gonna freak.”

“I know.”

The sesame seed bugs on the paper towel look harmless. I wish they could keep living on my body, but they itch like hell. How long have they been using my blood for food and my hair for a cozy home to raise their children? I think of them like the Mucinex bugs—with lava lamps and suspenders. If the lice is from the Uber driver or the librarian, the sex was clearly not worth this trouble. Piper asks if I’ll tell Owen. I shrug. He isn’t going to believe it’s his. He’ll accuse me of sleeping with someone else, and we’ll stare at the condensation form on our glasses of coke at some chain restaurant. Piper starts combing through my hair again, and with each brush stroke, I feel the tension of a hundred hair follicles. Piper stabilizes my head with one hand, and it feels like she might be stabilizing other parts of me too.

When our mom’s narcolepsy was at its worst, Piper and I would take turns washing her hair when she couldn’t wake up for work. After making breakfast to the sound of her alarm, we would drop medicine in her mouth and carry her to the tub while she mumbled and slumped as if she were drunk. We would undress her together, but only one of us would stay to wash her hair while the other would clean up breakfast. Both of us wanted the privilege of washing our mom’s hair. I’m not sure why I felt closer to her after massaging her sudsy scalp with tea tree shampoo, but those were my favorite mornings. Although we were proud of her when she didn’t need our help getting out of bed, I missed having a reason to wash her hair. The chemicals of lice shampoo do not smell as nice as tea tree oil, but the feeling is the same.

***

I type “How to decide to keep a,” and google suggests “pregnancy,” “foster dog,” and “relationship.” I look around the laundromat to make sure nobody can read my phone. I know the answer isn’t on Buzzfeed or Wikihow or Bustle, but I like to see emotions broken into logical steps. When Owen told me he couldn’t handle the waves of my emotions anymore, I read articles like “4 simple steps to handle being dumped like a pro,” “13 steps to find closure,” and “8 ways to survive being dumped while keeping your dignity intact.” Even with concrete numbers, I did not handle it like a pro, and I absolutely lost my dignity. After four years of dating, the break-up felt like a huge loss, but now, I might have his baby growing in me. Sure, maybe it’s an Uber driver baby or a librarian baby—but maybe I’m lucky and it’s Owen’s. For making a decision about pregnancy, Wikihow suggests being certain of your decision while being timely. It’s not helpful.

I step outside of Suds City and call my gynecologist. I stay in my t-shirt even though it’s below freezing, but my jacket stays wrapped around my belly. The air hurts my face, and my fingers stiffen. The pregnancy is dangerous for me and the baby with an IUD involved, so Dr. Gray says she’ll see me during her lunch break tomorrow. I ask if ten weeks is too far along for an abortion (not because I want to get one but because I’m not sure that I don’t want one), and she says it may have to be surgical because this may be an ectopic pregnancy—I may not have a choice at all. In Suds City, my three loads twirl into tie-dye of blues, blacks, and purples. Any little bugs living in the seams of my clothes or sheets are drowning in hot water, and I’m jealous. Even though they should all be dead, my head still itches.

***

My mom’s rusty Buick is in the driveway when I get home, and I vomit into the snow. When I walk in, my mom squeezes me tight, and we sit criss-cross on the kitchen floor. Piper must’ve spilled the news.

“Do you remember the wall cats?” my mom asks.

“Of course,” I say, “wall cats are hard to forget.”

“Remember how long we had to sledgehammer the walls before we could finally get to the kittens?” she says.

“It felt like hours.”

I picture my mom, Piper, and I taking turns with the sledgehammer, trying to break through the plaster: a six-year-old and eight-year-old smashing the wall to pieces while their mom stood by with enthusiasm and overalls. The dust filled our lungs and settled on our skin while we worried about silencing the meows we had been hearing for weeks. It was at one of my mom’s boyfriend’s houses, and that was the last day we lived there. We left the sledgehammer and the crumbled hole and took the twelve tabby cats with us in our Astro van. I never knew what happened to that boyfriend or why we left. My favorite kitten rode in my palms for the two-hour car ride. I named him Teapot because what else do you name a wall cat when you are six years old and holding such a fragile body? We dropped him off at the shelter on the way to grandma’s house, and every night for months I put cat food under my pillow, hoping he would find me.

“It felt good to smash that wall, didn’t it? Even though it took so long?” She looked tired and sad. “I’m sorry we couldn’t keep any of those kittens.”

I shrug. “Do you want to come to the doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”

“Of course,” she says.

I stare across the kitchen at the corner of my bedroom. The peeling pastel paint on the wall would flake into the would-be-baby’s crib, except the crib would probably be flaking paint too. I would have to find it on Craigslist and meet up with a stranger at their house. They’d say, “Glad you picked it up, we were just gonna use it for firewood,” and it would hit my ankles when Piper and I carried it inside. It might compliment my orange-velvet-asphalt couch, but the baby would get lost under my pile of clothes. I can barely afford community college, let alone a baby. Between Piper, my mom, and I, we still won’t have enough money. I might need to start selling my used underwear online again.

***

The sleep paralysis starts with a buzz. A mass of bees vibrate my body with their wings, and the others crawl up my nose and tickle my lips. Their needle-like proboscises are less beautiful when sucking water from my eyes instead of nectar from flowers. The background bees are a cloud of darkness and lancaster yellow. I’ve learned to not panic when I’m paralyzed, even if my room is a hive. When I collapse back into REM, I dream that a stranger slips lice into my ice tea. The lice are large enough to crunch between my teeth, and they multiply into thousands of squirming sprinkles.

Another stranger says, “When you bite those lice, they multiply 3,000 per second. Didn’t you know?”

***

In the morning, Piper, mom, and I take the Buick to the gynecologist.

Our mom asks, “How did you guys sleep last night?”

I say, “Sleep paralysis.”

“Me too,” says Piper, “with that old woman sitting on my chest.”

Piper and mom stay in the waiting room, and the nurse leads me to a room where I take off my pants, cover myself with thin paper, and wait on the bed. A poster reads “New and Improved Pain Scale” numbered from 1-10 where 1 is why am I here?, 4 is merely a flesh wound, 9 is mauled by wolves, and 10 is unconscious. My favorite is unconscious because the stick figure is surrounded by a pool of black blood and has three swords sticking out of his chest. I hope no one has ever felt mauled by wolves at the gynecologist.

The nurse leads me to the scale, and I try not to notice the way she smells like cigarettes and playdough as she stands close to adjust the measurements. She rattles off a list of the things I shouldn’t be consuming: swordfish, tuna, raw eggs, undercooked meat, homemade mayonnaise, and organ meat (more than once a week). She references her clipboard and takes my blood pressure; the squeeze around my arm is comforting. The tests continue: blood tests, urine test, genetic carrier screening, STD tests, and pap smear.

When Dr. Gray enters the room, she says, “Feet in the stirrups,” and then, “scooch closer.” The paper sticks to my ass, and the nurse walks in with a cart full of instruments that look like vintage ice cream scoopers and dentist tools. Dr. Gray says we have to remove the IUD whether or not I decide to keep the baby. After removing the dime-sized plastic, it feels as though she’s taken out a bowling ball. I feel empty after the foreign object is removed from my body, but it’s been with me for three years—one of the few constants in my life. They need test results to determine if it’s an ectopic pregnancy, and she says she’ll call me when the results come in.

“Before you go,” says Dr. Gray, “would you like to hear the baby’s heartbeat?”

I nod, and she invites my family into the room. If the baby felt temperature, the icy gel on my stomach would be the baby’s first frost. “These are the placental sounds,” she says as she moves the doppler lower on my stomach. It sounds like winter wind. My mom runs her hands through my hair. The heartbeat sounds like it’s an ocean away from us, and I wonder how tiny those valves must be. Like a series of gears in a machine, my lungs take in oxygen for my heart and for the baby. Those tiny valves are already relying on my body for food and oxygen intake. In not too long, the baby will rely on my mental health, too. Dr. Gray says the heartbeat is 170 beats per minute, which is normal for ten weeks. My baby’s heartbeat is fast, but it beats in rhythm with mine—quarter note heartbeats to my half notes.

***

At the next appointment, I learn the baby is a girl, and I’m 13 weeks along.

***

The familiar smell of the children’s museum—disinfectant and diarrhea—is nostalgic and nauseating.

“Hi,” I say to the front desk lady, “is Owen working?”

“Oh yes! He’s over in the fake food section. If you go up the stairs and to the—”

“Yup. Got it,” I say.

She grumbles some words behind me, but I’m focused on the piano stairs. I hit a few sharp notes on my way to Owen. He’s easy to spot in his blue apron that fits like a shirt—especially when the apron has a plastic banana sticking out of the front pocket. Children gang around him and laugh while he puts fake spaghetti on his head and pretends to swallow a plastic pile of peas. His laugh sends a familiar buzz through my body. I envy how kids flock to him. As soon as anyone smaller than two feet makes eye contact with me, they pout and hide behind their mother’s legs.

When Owen sees me, he freezes, and the spaghetti falls to the floor. As expected, the children become timid and clear the room. They leave all of their groceries behind. My first reaction is to nestle into his apron and take a whiff of his vanillaroma scent. Then, my instinct is to tell him about the lice, but I realize we are in a children’s museum and the word “lice” might get me kicked out. I settle on, “I’m pregnant.” Once it’s in the air, I wish I had said it as casually as Juno, with a pipe in my mouth and a tiger rug beneath my feet. He says, “Huh?” and I don’t know if he didn’t hear me or if he’s processing. My voice cracks the second time I say it.

“Is it mine?” he asks.

I purse my lips and nod hoping it comes off as both “sorry” and “guess you’re stuck with me” while trying to be cute in my new merlot lipstick. I’d rehearsed this part in the mirror and was supposed to tell the truth, but now that he’s in front of me, I want to keep him standing here. I want to stare at his furrowed caterpillar brows until they turn into moths and fly away.

I picture our kid laughing at Owen’s banana phone and riding on his shoulders and not running away from me. Our child would run toward my legs when she was scared because she would be mine, and she would love me because everyone loves their mother at first.

I’m so lost in the daydream I forget the baby is only a strawberry in my stomach.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know if it’s yours.” Though I’m glad to be telling the truth, it stings when he says, “That’s what I thought,” with boredom and disappointment.

“It’s a girl,” I say, “I had the second appointment this morning. She’s healthy, too.”

He opens the tiny cash register with a ding, counts some monopoly money, and hands it to a little girl peering around the corner. “You forgot your change.”

The silence is how I imagined. Our little girl sneaks into my daydream again and sits with us and the tension. Owen couldn’t handle my emotions, so how would he handle hers? I want to go home and curl up with my strawberry, alone.

He stares at the red register, “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t need you to do anything,” I say “I just wanted you to know it might be yours.”

On my way out, I crawl into a pair of lungs. The exhibit is filled with slides and crawl spaces with “Fun Lung Facts” along the way. The floor is pink and soft, and I climb as high as I can. There are only two children in the room with me, and they stay tucked away in the cardiac notch. The speakers play audio of deep breathing that reminds me of my recent ultrasound, and when I reach the trachea, I lie in fetal position. I imagine resting my head on my daughter’s lap. She will be with me through all of my future heartbreaks, suffering with me and supporting me. She will need me for combing inevitable lice out of her hair, and maybe she will wash my hair, too. By the time I push her out, she will have neurons and synapses and after a year, she’ll have a personality. I will be the center of her world, and her, the center of mine. In the trachea, I lie alone with my little girl.

Zoë Raine Maki is a writer, musician, and bartender based out of Marquette, Michigan. She holds a BS in Psychology from Northern Michigan University, where she was an editorial intern for Passages North. In the fall, she will be pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Western Washington University.