Page 49 of Counting Backwards

To my great surprise, I saw that my cycle was already two days late. I couldn’t believe that despite my hyperfocus on getting pregnant, I hadn’t noticed. I’d been so wrapped up in the case and all the stuff with Gram that I’d actually managed to lose track of when my period was due.

My hand shot up to my breast, and I poked at it to see if it was tender. It was not. Even so, between the two-day delay of menstruation and the unexplained nausea, I dared to hope. Come to think of it, I’d been a little queasy at my last meeting with Isobel too. I wouldn’t say anything to Vance until I knew one way or the other. And at that moment, I didn’t feel like saying anything to Vance at all.

My brunch forgotten, I grabbed my purse from the hook near the door and headed back to the elevator. I’d used up my supply of pregnancy tests and needed to buy more at the pharmacy. Vance would wonder where I was when he got out of the shower and found an empty apartment. After the way he’d spoken to me, I didn’t care. Let him sweat a little.

Twenty minutes later, when I returned to the apartment with a bag from Duane Reade in hand, Vance was gone. We hadn’t made any concrete plans to spend the afternoon together, but we had ticketsto seeThe Music Manon Broadway in the evening with Vance’s parents and Gram. Maybe he needed more alone time before all the family togetherness later, but still, it wasn’t like him to leave without telling me where he was going.

Except I had done it too.So at least we are still on the same page about one thing, I thought glibly.

Rather than dwell on Vance, I hurried to the bathroom to take the test. I’d used so many of these home tests over the past few months that I didn’t even glance at the instructions. When I set the wet test stick down on the counter, I flushed the toilet and pulled out my phone, planning to sit on the edge of the tub and scroll through social media while I waited the required five minutes for the results. I checked my reflection in the mirror first. My curls were pulled back in a low ponytail, and I had a slight flush to my cheeks. There were little blue half-moons under my eyes, probably because of the late nights doing research. I’d heard that a woman’s face sometimes changed during pregnancy, but so far I just looked like a tired version of my regular self.

My eyes drifted back to the test stick, and I saw something already beginning to appear. I leaned in closer, not believing my eyes. Two lines! The control line was significantly darker than the test line, but there were definitely two lines.

“There’s a second line!” I said into the empty bathroom.

Could it be that I was actually pregnant? In the very worst month of my entire relationship with Vance, I’d managed to conceive? I closed the toilet seat and sat down to stare at the test stick for the duration of the testing time so I could make sure the line didn’t disappear.Does that ever happen?I wondered.Do lines disappear after they’ve shown up?This was uncharted territory, and suddenly it seemed I was not an old pro at pregnancy tests at all.

When my phone alarm went off and the test still showed a positive result, I laughed out loud. I had given up hope of getting pregnant without some sort of medical intervention. I’d been so sure we would need serious fertility treatments and that even then, we might not see any action inside my uterus. It seemed utterly unfathomable that simply having sex with Vance could have resulted in me finally becoming pregnant again.

I thought then of my last time, how I’d been pregnant one minute, and the next, not. Was I going to fall in love with the fetus this time, only to lose it again? I wrapped an arm around my belly, willing the little cells, the beginnings of a baby, to stay put and keep doing their thing.

A few months earlier I would have called Vance immediately, shrieking in excitement. But right then, I was so frustrated with him that I didn’t even want to share the news. I wanted to hold on to it as a private nugget, for me alone, to simply bask in a moment of joy without any strife or disagreement. Maybe I could keep it to myself for a few days, like my own special treasure, before I had to tell him. I realized then that if I did that, my pregnancy would become just one more secret I was keeping from my husband. But for a few blissful moments, I simply didn’t care.

16

Carrie

October 1927

I’d been trapped deep inside the walls of the Colony for three whole entire years. Just a few months earlier, I’d had my twenty-first birthday, but all I got to show for it was an extra pinwheel cookie after supper that night. During my time inside, I’d gotten more familiar with the place, working different jobs and even getting friendly with some of the other patients. The first year, I’d been in the laundry, scrubbing soiled linens. Then at the start of my second year, they moved me to the cafeteria on account of my good behavior. I’d been working breakfast and lunch ever since. Folks around the Colony didn’t mind that I liked to keep quiet a lot of the time. It wasn’t as if they had so many choices when it came to keeping company anyhow. Some of the patients were in a truly bad way, never uttering a word, staring out the windows at nothing for all eternity. Those of us who were more alert, we kind of stuck together. When work shifts were over, we idled with each other in the little recreation room. There we could pass the minutes squabbling over who’d get the next turn with the marbles and such.

One Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting with Ma and a pretty lady named Lindy, the three of us arranging dominoes on a squaregame table. Lindy’d only been at the Colony a month, but with the way time moved inside, it felt like I’d known her forever. Meanwhile, Ma was having one of her clearheaded days, which had been getting fewer and fewer.

“Put one here,” Ma said, pointing to a spot I’d missed.

I was doing just as she said, taking care not to jostle the others, when that young nurse, Miss Bradshaw, brought in the day’s mail. Only a handful of us ever received correspondence. Gerty Sims, who had nine children on the outside, received a note from her oldest daughter from time to time, and Rosalie Barlow, who’d been brought into the Colony because of her addiction to alcohol, got mail near every week, but she would never tell us who-all was sending it to her.

“A letter from your fella,” Nurse Bradshaw said, dropping an envelope on the table and nearly toppling our dominoes.

“Ooo-eee! From your fella!” Lindy hollered, teasing me.

“He’s not my fella,” I said, just like I did every time a letter from Billy arrived. When I’d first come to the Colony, Billy sent me a letter every month. As the months dragged on though, the letters started coming slower, maybe every eight weeks when I was lucky. The other women heckled me every time, saying Billy and I were sweet on each other. I never paid it mind, but for some reason that day, I found myself wondering if Billy hadn’t met another girl yet. I didn’t like the way it made me feel inside to think of that. There was a tightening in my belly as I held on to that envelope and wondered again if I’d made a mistake not marrying him when he’d asked. Doing so would have saved me from being trapped where I was. That much I knew for sure.

“Well, go on,” Ma said. I guess she wanted the entertainment of news from the outside too.

Opening the envelope with my short fingernail, I expected to find much the same as usual in his letter, updates on his brothersand some news about his construction job. I wanted to hear tidings about my baby, Vivian, but he never offered any tidbits having to do with her. Before I got the letter out of its jacket, a newspaper clipping fell into my lap. Unfolding it, I saw the words up top said, “Supreme Court Votes to Uphold Virginia Sterilization Law.”

It had been near three years since they’d taken me to that courthouse, and I’d not heard anything about it since. I thought, after a time, that the matter had been put to the side or forgotten, and I’d been relieved, allowing myself to forget it too. But now that I saw the news Billy sent, my heart started to hammer once again.

I read through the article quickly, and I was comforted to see that it didn’t say anything about me. It talked instead about that man Laderdale, who, at the trial, had more to say than anyone else. I remembered how he’d compared wanton women to inferior cattle that could be bred out from the herd. I’d been shocked by it at the time, but my outrage had long since faded, the way things do when you get further and further away from them. But as I held the article all those years later, I worried that someone like the horrid Mr. Laderdale might be coming back for me.

Reading on, I learned that the Supreme Court of the United States, which I knew to be the most important court in all the country, had said Virginia’s sterilization law was just fine. The article reported that a great humanitarian by the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes had written the decision for the court. It spoke of his legal arguments, much of which was too confusing to make heads or tails of. I skipped forward to see if there was any mention of the Colony. As my eyes moved down the paper, one sentence about what Mr. Holmes had written did jump out at me.

“It is better for all the world,” the court’s opinion said, “if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to letthem starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

A weight settled in my stomach as I remembered afresh the things said about me when they brought me to the Amherst County courthouse. Though I’d hoped that nonsense had been forgotten, the article in my hand said different.

The newspaper praised the court’s decision as being broad-minded and called anyone opposing it a sentimentalist. Then it talked more about that man Laderdale and how his model sterilization law was fit to be adopted in states all throughout the country. Laderdale, they said, was a hero who would be responsible for reforming the entire human race. They called him progressive and said he worked tirelessly to educate other scientists. He had support from our country’s richest families, like the Carnegies and Rockefellers, and others I’d never heard of, and he was getting money from all of them to do more research. His work was keeping immigrants out of the country and preserving the high quality of the American population.