"All That Life" by Susan Holcomb
By the time Elissa woke up it was over; there had been two babies in her womb and now there was one. The walls of the room where she lay were painted blue, light blue, and upon waking her first thought was that she was now residing inside an eggshell. The light coming in through the window had taken on a rich orange cast since she’d last been awake, and when Elissa put her hand out the light seemed to shine through her fingertips, exposing the rosy colors underneath her skin. She closed her eyes. Yes—she was in an eggshell, a taut little eggshell, and if she were to walk to the window or the wall and tap with intention, the blue-painted room would surely shatter to pieces around her…
When she woke again there was a knock at the door. A nurse in pink scrubs entered. Elissa wished the nurse had worn a different color. Not blue; blue would be worse. Green, maybe, something neutral: orange, yellow, purple, white, grey.
“You’re awake?” the nurse asked.
The IV attached to the back of Elissa’s hand was making her whole arm ache. “Can you take this out?”
“Sorry, honey. Not until we’ve discharged you.” The nurse came over to the bed and pulled up Elissa’s gown. “No bleed-through. That’s a good sign.”
Elissa looked down. The swell in her belly was still there; it really looked like nothing had changed. The only evidence of the procedure was the white bandage across her abdomen and the deep ache now spreading through the space beneath her belly button. At least the bandage isn’t blue, she thought. Or pink.
“Which one did they leave in?” she asked.
The nurse checked the chart. “Fetus A. Closer to the cervix. Better for labor to do the removal that way.”
“And the other fetus—it’s all right?”
“Oh yes,” the nurse said. “Both babies are doing fine.”
Babies. Elissa’s chest contracted. She’d forced herself never to think of them that way. When she and Charles spoke of them, they said fetuses—early on, Charles would even correct her further, “Embryos.” Fetus became more deeply ingrained in their vocabulary when, at eight weeks, the doctor told them Elissa would not be able to carry both soon-to-be-fetuses to term.
“Your best option,” the doctor had said, “is to move one fetus to an artificial womb.”
“An artificial womb?” Elissa had asked. “I thought those were still experimental.” She glanced over at Charles, who was slumped in a grey chair by the wall. He said nothing.
“It’s more common than you think,” the doctor said. “But people don’t talk about it. Because of the stigma. Some women get superstitious. They worry people will view the baby gestated artificially as less their own child.”
“We won’t get superstitious,” Charles said. He crossed his arms and started pulling on his mustache. Though Charles had always said he wanted kids, he had spent the first three years of their marriage brushing off Elissa’s suggestions that they agree on a timeline for when to start trying. For Charles, children were something that would happen some day, in an ever-more-distant hypothetical future, with no positive action on his part required to bring them into being. “I’m getting older,” Elissa finally told him as her thirty-fourth birthday approached. “Well, we can do whatever you want,” he had said. Consequently, whatever happened now seemed wholly Elissa’s creation, wholly Elissa’s fault.
Elissa coughed. “And it’s safe? This artificial womb?”
The doctor nodded. “There are risks of complications. But it’s a straightforward procedure. Three days of inpatient care, and you’ll be on your way.” He smiled. “With two healthy babies a few months later.”
Elissa grimaced.
“You’ll have to make it to twenty weeks first,” the doctor said. “We have to ensure the fetuses are big enough to transfer.”
Twenty weeks. It would be summer by then. The Texas heat would be climbing, every car would have the air conditioning on full blast. Elissa imagined she would be massive by then: breasts huge, stomach huge, sweat pooling no matter how much the AC blasted. By twenty weeks so many of the pregnancy’s sweetest milestones would have passed already: telling her family, finding out the babies’ sexes. Before this doctor’s visit, Elissa had imagined these experiences would be among the happiest of her life. But now any event having to do with her pregnancy would come with a huge caveat, a dark underside, a dangling but which would not be resolved until the doctors finally cut her open and removed half of what was growing inside her. Elissa wished the procedure was over and done with already. All she wanted now was to be twenty-one weeks pregnant, with one fetus in her belly and one fetus tucked safely away wherever they put it. A big glass jar, the doctor explained. She shuddered at the thought.
The next weeks had been full of testing: needles in the belly to check for genetic abnormalities, family medical histories entered painstakingly into computer terminals, blood draws for her and Charles both. Elissa kept a notebook of every test she had to take, writing down appointment times and prescription lists and instructions for preparation and aftercare as she spoke with receptionists in what felt like every doctor’s office in the greater Dallas area. Meanwhile she started to dream of the earth splitting. She would be walking beside the tangle of trumpet flowers that grew along the fence in her backyard when a few feet ahead of her the ground would crack wide open. As she staggered away from the growing canyon, a dark presence would rise from the gap. What was it? A storm cloud? A nascent tornado? The dark mass emerged huge and disparate but then grew smaller and smaller, until it condensed to the size of a dust mote. Then, with a furious intensity, the hard dark speck would fling itself towards Elissa’s face. She was never able to reach up to swat the speck away, and so it progressed unimpeded to its entry point: her mouth, her nose, or most frequently the corner of her eye. In those weeks of waiting, Elissa slept reluctantly, opened her eyes slowly upon waking, worried the mass was somewhere nearby, or inside of her already. Some days she would rub her eyes and become certain she could feel it lodged under her skin.
Meanwhile her body kept growing. Her old jeans were out, maternity jeans purchased. New bras, replaced as her breasts went up one cup size, then two. The constant nausea sapped her; she found this ever-present inclination to vomit impossible to sustain. Elissa decided other pregnant people must be different. They had their excitement to balance out their sickness, whereas she had only dread. The happily pregnant would already be calling the fetuses growing within them their babies. But Elissa couldn’t even think of them as hers. What had she to do with their coming to be? What did she know of the biological processes that sparked life into dormant tissue? She had wanted this pregnancy, yes, but she had never controlled it. What was happening inside of her was at best mysterious, at worst foreign, alien, monstrous, a big mistake. She imagined the fetuses nestling beside each other, ringed in that peculiar zen-like wisdom that must be as accessible to the unborn as to the dead. To birth them would be a degradation of all their quiet mystery; to open the womb before their time would be a violation unimaginably worse. Elissa was afraid to voice these thoughts to Charles. She worried he would confirm that yes, this was a big mistake: he had wanted a normal pregnancy, an uncomplicated pregnancy, and it was just like Elissa—meandering-minded Elissa, restless, complicated Elissa—to double up the fetus count unnecessarily, setting off a cascade of complications that now led them here, to the place where they could not say babies.
Now, in the blue-walled room, the pink-scrubbed nurse was saying something about her fluid levels.
Elissa sat up on her pillows. “What happens now?”
“Now?” the nurse said. “Now you rest for another day or two, and then we send you home.”
“But after that,” Elissa said. “With the artificial womb.”
The nurse went to sit at the computer terminal. “We’ll monitor your baby’s progress. When gestation is complete, we’ll deliver the baby to you.”
“I won’t see it until then? When it’s born?”
“Didn’t you read the forms they gave you?”
Hadn’t she? There had been so many forms to initial and to sign. Mostly they concerned one’s responsibility to pay, Elissa recalled. She had been so focused on getting through the procedure, she hadn’t allowed herself to think about what would be on the other side. “I just thought we’d have some options,” she said.
The nurse was typing something on the keyboard. “We can live-stream the birth for you at your request. But we don’t allow non-medical professionals in the room.” She stopped and met Elissa’s eyes. “You wouldn’t want to see the baby until the birth anyway. At this stage of development their skin is translucent. Their hair grows in white. You understand, most people find it disorienting.”
Elissa’s stomach jumped. Her abdomen cramped; the skin where they had cut her open strained. “Something’s wrong,” she said, reaching down to touch the gauze. “My stitches are splitting.”
The nurse came over and examined the bandage. Elissa’s stomach jumped again. The nurse smiled. “That’s your little guy kicking! They tend to get very active a few hours after the procedure.”
The nurse placed Elissa’s hand over the bandage on her stomach. The jumps continued; a foot, a fist. “I feel sick,” Elissa said.
“I’ll bring you some crackers. Some juice.”
When Elissa woke again the room was dark. Her lips felt crusted over. She imagined some mistaken doctor had sewn her mouth shut. As she slowly opened her mouth her dry lips split and cracked. They tasted of blood, though they weren’t bleeding. Elissa touched the gauze on her stomach. No bleeding there either. The fetus that remained in her womb was still.
Through a crack in the curtains she could see a yellow light. A full moon, low in the sky. A night of transformations. Tadpoles into frogs. Fetuses into babies. Where once there had been two babies in her body there was now one. Her chest contracted. She touched her stomach. Cells had split and then merged. How could she contain all that life?
She went into the hall. The overhead lights were out. What light there was came from the sconces on the walls. They were the night lights she’d had as a child, glowing always more orange than yellow, they were the trumpet flowers in her backyard at home. And now the floor in front of me will split open, Elissa thought. Now the black mass will emerge. She stepped forward as if walking on ice.
She passed down the hall, through the white double doors marked RESTRICTED PERSONNEL ONLY, and around the corner. The hallway was one long series of unmarked doors, but somehow she knew where to go. Perhaps she was subject to some maternal instinct, drawing her forward like water down a hill. Or maybe more time passed than she realized; maybe she had actually wandered the halls for hours, peering behind every door until she finally found what she hadn’t known she had been looking for. A door, unmarked like all the others. Her hand on the doorknob, charged up with static. Inside, the blinking machines cast their alternating green and red flashes across the room. Elissa moved as if gliding on wheels. She imagined being pushed forward smoothly, irresistibly, towards the source of something, back to a point of origin. Frog into tadpole. Chicken back to egg. A full-grown woman face to face with her beginning.
The alternating light shined green again and she saw them. Fetuses. Babies. But they didn’t look like babies. Colorless bleached-out creatures floating in a rosy liquid, cords at their round bellies attached to nasty purple placentas. The placentas, Elissa recalled, were hooked up to donor blood supplies that would provide the fetuses with everything they’d need. They did not have hair. Their eyes stayed, thankfully, closed. Their bellies were the largest part of them besides their heads, and though Elissa knew these proportions were normal for this stage of fetal development, she couldn’t help thinking these floating creatures looked unusually swollen, bloated in the way drowned corpses are.
Elissa had imagined she would know her baby when she saw it, but no, she had to read the little stickers affixed to each glass jar. This was a small facility; it didn't take long. Harris-Hunt, Elissa. Fetus XY.
The blinking lights cast red as she looked closer—her baby. Hers. And yet; this label on the glass—Fetus XY—was all that tied her to this child. Anyone could switch the labels, remove them, scratch them out. She could peel the label off right now, free herself from the memories of all the needles that had punctured her, the stitches at her belly, the nurses always in their blue and pink. The doctors with their fingers inside her, everyone correcting her no matter whether she said baby or fetus or embryo, so certain they all had the language to encompass her experience, when it was so obvious to her that they did not. The doctors saying your babies to her and Charles both, as if she and Charles laid equal claim to them. But they aren’t ours, Elissa thought. They’re mine, they’re only mine. Mine to keep and mine to remove. Mine to claim and mine to cast out.
Elissa ran her hand over the label. The glass beneath the paper was surprisingly warm. She would think later: I would never really have done it, but she had her nail under the corner of the label when the jumping in her stomach started up again. She knew now what it was—the violent kicking of the son that remained. Her skin split. The gauze over her belly grew wet. And soon the blood began to drip out in a slow trickle, pooling on the floor beneath the body of the son in the jar.
Twenty weeks later, her labor was blessedly, horribly fast. Pain wasn’t the right word for the experience of contraction, it was more like seizure, the awful, irresistible feeling of being possessed. Charles drove her to the hospital, where despite the pre-labor promises of private rooms with bathtubs and aromatherapy, there were no beds available. “The full moon sent everyone into labor,” the nurses said, and Elissa gave birth to her first baby in an operating room meant for handling C-sections. An hour later, after the doctor had set the baby on her chest, after the nurses had weighed and measured him and wiped the last traces of blood from his hair, someone discreetly rolled the second baby into the recovery room. Whether the moon had quickened the process in the artificial womb or the timing was simply standard procedure, Elissa never knew. But they were there now, two babies in blue-and-pink striped hats and blue-and-pink striped swaddles, side by side in their identical bassinets. Charles fell asleep on the cot in the corner, while Elissa stayed awake in her hospital bed.
As morning approached, a nurse came in to check Elissa’s blood pressure. “Twins!” she said. She gave Elissa a box of cranberry juice and took the IV out of her arm. “Was it difficult?”
On the back of Elissa’s hand a little bruise had formed. “It was very fast,” she said.
The nurse patted her leg. “Don’t worry. You’ll forget everything but the good parts.”
After the nurse left, Elissa went over to where the babies were sleeping. The whole lower half of her body ached, she was sweaty and her ankles had swollen into trunks. The babies had little cards on the bassinets with their names now, the names she had chosen. Scrunched up little faces, still not-quite persons. They breathed easily, like a symbiotic organism, one breathing in as the other breathed out.
The baby on the left moved his mouth as if to suckle. Elissa felt scared to touch him. He’s your baby, she told herself. You don’t need permission. He’s yours. But still, she hesitated. Soon the other baby began to stir. You need to do something, she thought. You should know what to do.
She picked up the baby on the left. Bigger but still so tiny, she thought of how easily he might slip through her arms. Clutching the baby to her chest, she leaned over the second baby’s bassinet. Carefully, carefully, she slipped one hand under the second baby’s head, then his lower body, shifting him progressively rightward, until he was at the edge of the bassinet. She set the first baby down beside him.
The door opened. Elissa snatched the first baby up again and turned to the entering nurse. The nurse simply smiled. “You can feed him if you want,” she said, and the baby in Elissa’s arms opened his tiny mouth.
Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been or will soon be published in the Southern Indiana Review, The Boston Globe, Moon City Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.
